Plays Well with Others - Softcover

Gurganus, Allan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375702032 ISBN 13: 9780375702037

Publisher: Vintage, 1999

Synopsis

With great narrative inventiveness and emotional amplitude, Allan Gurganus gives us artistic Manhattan in the wild 1980s, where young artists--refugees from the middle class--hurl themselves into playful work and serious fun.  Our guide is Hartley Mims Jr., a Southerner whose native knack for happiness might thwart his literary ambitions. Through his eyes we encounter the composer Robert Christian Gustafson, an Iowa preacher's son whose good looks constitute both a mythic draw and a major limitation, and Angelina "Alabama" Byrnes, a failed deb, five feet tall but bristling with outsized talent.  These friends shelter each other, promote each other's work, and compete erotically.  When tragedy strikes, this circle grows up fast, somehow finding, at the worst of times, the truest sort of family.

Funny and heartbreaking, as eventful as Dickens and as atmospheric as one of Fitzgerald's parties, Plays Well with Others combines a fable's high-noon energy with an elegy's evening grace.  Allan Gurganus's celebrated new novel is a lovesong to imperishable friendship, a hymn to a brilliant and now-vanished world.

About this title

Review

Allan Gurganus achieved national fame in 1988 for his award-winning Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Through this long, garrulous novel, Gurganus retold and explicated almost a century of American history, life, and culture. In Plays Well with Others, Gurganus applies a similar technique to the New York gay art scene in the 1980s, just as AIDS is appearing. Narrated by Hartley Mins, a young artist who "came to New York to write," the novel is an elegiac reminiscence of a culture that, by encouraging personal and sexual freedom, instilled in its artists the ability to create in the face of mortality, love in the midst of loss, and care in a world in which hope is vanishing. Reading Plays Well with Others is a heady experience: its images and emotions spill into our imaginations and lives, forcing us to reexamine how we see the world and how we look at art.

From the Back Cover

Plays Well with Others chronicles a ragtag group of gifted kids who come to seek their fortunes; they find the low-paying joys of making art and the heady education only multiple erotic partners can provide. Having mythologized each other through the boom years, having commenced becoming "names", they suddenly encounter a brand-new disease like something out of fifth-rate sci-fi. Friends are soon questioning how much they really owe each other; they're left with the ancient consolation of one another's company and help. We watch this egotistic circle forge its single greatest masterwork: a healthy community.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0375702032
• ISBN 13: 9780375702037
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368