Synopsis
Dining in a Los Angeles eatery after Dominick's appearance on a popular quiz show, HIV-positive Timothy and Dominick discuss their lives and AIDS and the friends they have lost to it
Reviews
Coe, author of the striking novel of gay life, I Look Divine , outdoes himself in this lapidary new tale of an 18-year affair between photographer Timothy Springer and his wealthy, worldly, older lover Jasper. Timothy adores Jasper, who has taught him everything, taken him everywhere and given him all the finer things in life, including his appreciation of glamor and luxe. Jasper, however, already has a lover with whom he shares a house; he also has a taste for casual sex with strangers on the docks. Filtered through Timothy's consciousness as part of a dinner conversation after Jasper's death, Timothy's story of masochistic love and ultimate betrayal wanders back and forth through time, from the beginning of their relationship to Jasper's last days, through all the complicated negotiations that go on in love affairs. Timothy's dinner companion is Dominic, an old friend now stricken with AIDS who is linked both to his host and to Jasper in the sexual past. Deftly plotted and full of surprises, the novel showcases Coe's distinctive, occasionally superb writing, a brilliant verbal mirror of his narrator's obsession with flat-out, drop-dead elegance. The prose's elegiac beauty elevates what might have been merely an odyssey of gay sex and shopping into something deeply transcendent, reminiscent of both Oscar Wilde's and Marcel Proust's late writings. Angry, melancholy and obsessed with the injustices of love, this may well be the gay novel of the decade.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A chatty and ultimately brittle second novel (after Coe's I Love Devine, 1987) about a gay man and his two lovers in the age of AIDS. Coe tells his story through a series of flashbacks, taking readers on a tour of the unbridled gay sex scene of the 70's and early 80's. Timothy, the discursive and self-conscious narrator, a self-described ``pansy bitch of the world,'' knocks his way around Manhattan's bathhouses and sex clubs and learns some brutal lessons (e.g., he always goes to other men's houses for sex because ``no man is apt to kill you in his house, where he would be obliged to get rid of the body''). Eventually, Timothy befriends two older, more sophisticated men--Jasper, who becomes his longtime lover, and Dominick. The bulk of the story is Timothy's frivolous and onrushing account of the ``splendid'' meals, sex, and travel he and his lovers once enjoyed. (None of these characters appears to be employed in any fashion, but they live fabulously nonetheless.) Meanwhile, Timothy's faux sophistication is often cloying: ``I upgraded to first class and ranted when a negroni could not be provided. I bitched about the champagne, hissed at the stewardess that I despised Dom Perignon.'' The book takes a more serious tone when, later, the specter of AIDS looms. Jasper dies, and Dominick falls ill. When Timothy discovers he's HIV-positive, he wanders the streets, scanning faces for ``signs of illness.'' He half expects to see ``thousands of men looking like Rock Hudson, with those same frightened eyes.'' It all ends on something of an upbeat note--when Timothy decides to take his infection as a challenge to live more fully. By this point, though, most readers will be exasperated by Coe's tone-deaf prose. Timothy has an awful disease, but in the end he's too much of a twit to care about deeply. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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