Geography of the Heart

In this poignant memoir, the author interweaves two fascinating stories: his own upbringing as the youngest of nine children of a Kentucky whiskey maker and that of his lover Larry Rose, the only child of German Jews, survivors of the Holocaust. With grace and affectionate humor, he follows their relationship from their first meeting through Larry's death.
"I'm so lucky," his lover told him repeatedly, even as he was confronting HIV. "Denial, pure and simple," Johnson told himself, "until our third and final trip to Paris, where on our last night in the city we sat together in the courtyard of the Picasso Museum. There I turned to him and said 'I'm so lucky,' and it was as if the time allotted to him to teach me this lesson, the time allotted to me to learn it had been consumed, and there was nothing left but the facts of things to play out."

Novelist Johnson (Scissors, Paper, Rock) watched his lover, San Francisco high-school teacher Larry Rose, die of AIDS in a Paris hospital in 1990 after an intense three-year relationship. Rose was HIV-positive but asymptomatic when they met, and while their lovemaking was haunted by fear of contagion, the author remains HIV-negative. Rose, the only child of German Jewish Holocaust survivors?his father, Leo, was imprisoned and beaten by the Nazis in Holland, escaped and hid for three years with broken vertebrae?had a very different background from that of Johnson, who grew up Catholic and the youngest of nine in an isolated Appalachian town in Kentucky. Johnson writes with crystal clarity of his gradual acceptance by his lover's emigrant parents, of coming out to his own widowed mother at 31, of Rose's gradual physical deterioration and of his working through grief toward emotional renewal. This is a remarkable memoir, touching, funny, searing, eloquent, beautifully alive.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A spiritual autobiography in the form of a novelist's memoir about losing his lover to AIDS. What can you say about a book that makes you cry on page 3? That it does so again on page 4 complicates the reviewer's job further. Nevertheless, this is not a tearjerker: Johnson's (Scissors, Paper, Rock, 1993, etc.) memoir is a moving expansion of the genre. The last of nine children in a devoutly Catholic rural Kentucky family, Johnson was initially the pursued and not the pursuer in the relationship he memorializes here. Larry Rose's background--San Francisco high school English teacher, the only child of German-Jewish Holocaust survivors--could scarcely have been more dissimilar. Johnson resists entanglement: Larry is HIV- positive, and he legitimately fears having his life taken over by responsibility for Larry's care once he develops AIDS. He also fears the pain of becoming attached to someone he will lose. What he discovers is that being in love with Larry transforms him. As Johnson writes in an extraordinary passage about ministering to Larry on a daring trip to France just days before the invalid's death: ``I understood the shallowness of my fears that I might abandon Larry once he grew sick. Now I only wanted to be with him and to care for him, for in caring for him I was caring for myself. I discovered that I loved even his illness and his dying . . . because they were a part of him; there was no having him without these.'' The labors arising from love, Johnson learns, are not labors. We think of memoirs as retrospective narratives of long lives. Where AIDS is involved, the time frame is very different, the intention more urgent. This profoundly moving, painfully honest book is a remarkable testament to a short life and the enduring love that emerged from it. It deserves the widest possible audience. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Although formally as old as literature itself, Johnson's story of growing up, falling in love, and enduring the beloved's death is as relevant as one's own life. It is his life, a memoir dominated by his relationship with Larry Rose. Larry, HIV-positive when he and Johnson became a couple, had a zest for living that, ironically, lightened his lover's approach to life. The two could not have had more different backgrounds: Fenton was the youngest in a huge rural Kentucky family; Larry, the only son of Jewish immigrants to California. Larry fell in love with Fenton almost immediately and wooed him until he gave in to their being a couple. Their life together, their frequent travels to France, their mutual acceptance of both life and death, and then Johnson's grief at his loss make wrenching yet rewarding reading, recommended to virtually all public libraries. Charles Harmon

This rare and moving memoir is the story of two men who met, fell in love, lived, loved, and experienced death in one of the worst epidemics of our time. Novelist Fenton (Crossing the River, LJ 7/89); writes masterfully about his deceased lover, Larry Rose. They are opposites in many ways: Catholic and Jew, Southerner and Californian, descendant of Appalachian folk and descendant of Holocaust survivors, HIV negative and HIV positive. Yet they know they are right for each other and, perhaps more importantly, right for the times. Johnson not only describes their three years together but also their prehistories: Johnson's growing up in rural Kentucky, Rose's parents hiding from Nazis under the floorboards of a house in Holland. The level of compassion, understanding, and love between these two men is a testament to how humans could and should treat each other. Rose used to say, even in the face of terrible odds, how lucky he was. Anyone who reads this work will also feel lucky for having done so. Recommended for all types of libraries.?Lee Arnold, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.