Such Times

Christopher Coe has captured the trivial and the profound in a perfect novel. No piece of prose dealing with the aids experience is as elegant. The style, established beautifully in the first few sentences, is hard to describe but has a quiet power - crisp, ironic, unhurried, but tense with things left unsaid and unresolved. The characters' artificiality is part of the novel's authenticity. While Death stalks them, the characters preen and dither over perfect meals and shiney surfaces. The three central characterizations are built impressionistically, and the reader needs to be as observent as the central character to glean all the sub texts and subtelties of their relationship. We learn a lot about them through their putdowns, yet the writing isn't heavy with bitchy dialogue. There is poignancy in the way each is determined to make a life where everything is beautiful. The final effect of this supremely intelligent novel is dignity and the importance of friendship. Masterful non-fiction writing has mapped the aids catastrophe ("Borrowed Time" by Paul Monette, ""Holding the Man" by Tim Conigrave, "Take Me To Paris Johnny" by John Foster)The traffic of sexuality in 70's has been dazzlingly recreated in the classic "Dancer from the Dance" by Andrew Holleran. "Such Times" is a special book even in this rarefied literary company. Fiction is about casting a spell; Christopher Coe is a magician.

A literary attempt to find a safe refuge in the midst of an apocalypse. This is a beautiful, gentle, loving work documenting a long relationship in the shadow of AIDS. Coe gives us one of the most effective examples of an AIDS counterliterature to address the depersonalization and dehumanization of prevailing AIDS rhetorics (as expressed in the mass media, the medical community and, ultimately, the "history" of our culture). Coe's Timothy notes that: "The appearance of the people with the virus, how they look physically, is more widely documented than what they feel under their skin, inside themselves" (204). Coe's text is thus an attempt to negotiate the boundries of the self and society. The physical body becomes the space upon which the medical crises of AIDS and HIV are enscribed, just as the representational crises (the "victim," "pariah," "infected," "patient," etc.) are written on the identity of the gay man living with HIV. HIV changes the way people see themselves, as well as how others perceive them. Timothy ponders hiding his HIV status, then decides against it because "You cease to be yourself, you become your secret" (202), and he seeks to be more than a text withheld. Jasper and Timothy find the deepest meaning in the sexual pleasures they share, the friends who gather around them, and particularly the dinners they enjoy. This counters the focus on the course of a disease ravaging an isolated physical body and draining a spirit. The author offers sexual and epicurean imagery, rife with sensual details, as a means of countering the depersonalization of disease and death. After Jasper's death, Timothy makes love with an older man and reflects afterward: "if we are not a little more alive for being together, we are not any deader for it, either. The pleasure this man gave me will last a long time" (307). Coe titles his work "Such Times" because one of his characters reflects on her libertine life in the 1970s and says, "It's hard to believe there used to be such times" (5). If the ongoing invisibility of AIDS in the mass media continues, future generations will likewise find it difficult to imagine the pain and dislocation, as well as the strength, heroism, and triumph of gay men in times of AIDS. What we are left with in Coe's few works, in the works of Peter McGehee, Paul Monette, and others, offers promise that literature can make a significant contribution in overcoming the crisis of representation. The AIDS counterliterature reestablishes the identity of the person living with HIV, offers new or multiple sources of self-empowerment, and offers personal testimony as an important component in an alternative kind of history. This is literature that heals.

This work is intense and intimate -- a stream of consciousness without the need for apology in its details. Coe's interplay of the seemingly trivial elements of life with the final, ultimately singular experience of death is handled with a poignant reserve. Each character, every element, invites the reader to observe the maturity of the human spirit over a period of years. Love is the central, timeless focal point: from the self-adoring youthfulness with which Timothy begins, through the bittersweet longing with which he lets go. Every person with whom I've shared this marvelous story needed only to read the first paragraph before realizing there was no turning back. It is a book for all times.

Never having read a review of my favorite gay novel (and one of the few worth even a mention in literary terms), I was surprised by how misunderstood it has been. "Brittle", "cloying", and "tone-deaf"? What novel did Kirkus Reviews read? Coe is the most eloquent and sophisticated of gay writers, and reminded me more of Proust than of other contemporary gay novels (of the "Will Bob succeed in picking up the buff gym boy or will his heart be broken forever" ilk, or, worse still, the "poignant, funny, uplifting coming out story volume 412"). Structurally, the novel is breathtaking, juggling its leaps in time so brilliantly that the result is a sort of dialogue between past and present, even between old selves and new. Not only do revelations from the past echo in the present, but the present reverberates in the past. This novel shows us modern gay writing as it has never been before and (so far) has not been again, and as such, it's sad but hardly surprising that it's been misunderstood. Calling Timothy "frivolous" is roughly equal in obviousness to calling Captain Ahab "obsessive" or Sylvia Plath "self-absorbed", and it in no way subtracts from the power and the pain of seeing him forced by life and death to lose his innocence and mature into something more. Frivolous or not, he's a character most of us have known and fallen for in life--someone who turns up the volume and makes even the most mundane elements of life seem crucial and real.Coe's previous novel, "I Look Divine", was a small masterpiece, but "Such Times" is a full-blown classic--sensual and lovely, sad, funny, bitter, and profound, difficult but immensely gratifying. If gay literature is ever to be about more than cruising and coming to terms with who we want to make whoopee with, we should greet writers like Christopher Coe with much joy, hope, and, of course, frivolousness.

First, let me correct Kirkus's factual errors: Timothy and Dominic have been friends only since their college days at Berkeley in the early 1970s; except for Dominic, whose has family money, all of the characters work (Timothy is a portrait photographer, Jasper owns an import company, Abigail is a medical writer, etc.); and the novel contains just one, rather brief, explicit sex scene, in a side street in Paris. Also, when the book opens, Jasper has been dead for some time. As Timothy remembers his 18 years with Jasper, during a long evening with Dominic in LA, the reader discovers a beautiful, accurate portrait of gay relationships during the 1970s and the early plague years (though not once does the word gay appear). Some scenes are unbearably moving, as when Timothy and Jasper sit on a stone jetty in Provincetown looking at the night sky, and Timothy realizes that life has, at certain moments, given him nearly all he has dared to hope for. AIDS appears as an almost metaphorical presence, less an unspeakable tragedy than an interloper that forces Timothy to assess the exact nature of his life with Jasper. The reader sees the unequal love between these two men as the focus of the book, so their eventual illness conveys pathos rather than the usual cloying self-pity. I recommend this novel to anyone who wonders about that unique time between the paranoid post-war years and this era of discourse about marriage, polyamory, monogamy, adoption, ghettoes, guppies, circuits, dysfunctional families, barebacking, substance abuse, body fascism, etc., etc. (An aside: Coe has about as much in common with Gary Indiana--an excellent writer with a surreal, blackly comic vision--as, say, Agatha Christie with Andrew Vachss; not much.)