Man. I understand why this book got great reviews and won awards, etc.--it is solid literary fiction, about Chicago during the mid-'80s AIDS crisis, plus a contemporary plot, so it's got the back and forth narrative structure of uncertainty and discovery that those sorts of plots create, and the characters are interesting and are neither so good that they don't feel like real people nor so horrible that you don't want them to be real people, but I kept reading it thinking 'well I guess if you've never read Tony Kushner or Larry Kramer or Michael Cunningham this might be really affecting.' Which is both unfair but also not, in my view; I am not entirely sure what the perspective of a straight white woman writing a fictional work about this time added, frankly.
And that goes double for the contemporary piece of the narrative, which I did not care about at all. If it was trying to explore the way trauma affects the survivors of a plague, it didn't land for me, and if it wasn't doing that then I have even less understanding of the point.
The story isn't a direct comparison with Angels in America, but the main couple has enough of Prior and Louis in them that when Yale, the Prior of this story, gets the virus in perhaps the most contrived narrative in the whole story, it feels like a bait and switch to me: you thought he was going to improbably dodge it, and now he's going to get it in the most stupid way possible. And it's not that people didn't either get it when statistically it was very likely, or get it when they probably shouldn't, but it felt like the work of a story, to spare him from the expected transmission and then pull the rug out from the reader. And because it goes to the present day, you have a feeling he can't survive from the beginning, but part of the strength of something like Angels in America is in Prior making it to the end. It's important to have works that really dig into the hole left in our culture by the entire generation of gay and bisexual men who died, but that wasn't what this felt like, either. It's a story about reality that offended me in what it decided to create to tell it as fiction. I am sure others felt differently, but I don't know what I was supposed to take from this story.
Grade: C
And that goes double for the contemporary piece of the narrative, which I did not care about at all. If it was trying to explore the way trauma affects the survivors of a plague, it didn't land for me, and if it wasn't doing that then I have even less understanding of the point.
The story isn't a direct comparison with Angels in America, but the main couple has enough of Prior and Louis in them that when Yale, the Prior of this story, gets the virus in perhaps the most contrived narrative in the whole story, it feels like a bait and switch to me: you thought he was going to improbably dodge it, and now he's going to get it in the most stupid way possible. And it's not that people didn't either get it when statistically it was very likely, or get it when they probably shouldn't, but it felt like the work of a story, to spare him from the expected transmission and then pull the rug out from the reader. And because it goes to the present day, you have a feeling he can't survive from the beginning, but part of the strength of something like Angels in America is in Prior making it to the end. It's important to have works that really dig into the hole left in our culture by the entire generation of gay and bisexual men who died, but that wasn't what this felt like, either. It's a story about reality that offended me in what it decided to create to tell it as fiction. I am sure others felt differently, but I don't know what I was supposed to take from this story.
Grade: C
No comments:
Post a Comment