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Plays Well with Others
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.
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.
368 pages, Paperback
First published October 28, 1997
44 people are currently reading
929 people want to read
About the author
Allan Gurganus
66 books138 followersSince 1989, Allan Gurganus’s novels, stories and essays have become a singularly unified and living body of work. Known for dark humor, erotic candor, pictorial clarity and folkloric sweep, his prose is widely translated. Gurganus’s stories, collected as “Piccoli eroi”, were just published to strong Italian reviews. France’s La Monde has called him “a Mark Twain for our age, hilariously clear-eyed, blessed with perfect pitch.”
Fiction by Gurganus has inspired the greatest compliment of all: memorization and re-reading. The number of new critical works, the theatrical and film treatments of his fiction, testify to its durable urgency. Adaptations have won four Emmy. Robert Wilson of The American Scholar has called Gurganus “the rightful heir to Faulkner and Welty.” In a culture where `branding’ seems all-important, Gurganus has resisted any franchised repetition. Equally adept at stories and novels or novellas, his tone and sense of form can differ widely. On the page Gurganus continues to startle and grow.
Of his previous work “The Practical Heart”, critic Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times, “Masterly and deeply affecting…a testament to Mr. Gurganus’s ability to inhabit his characters’ inner lives and map their emotional histories.” The Atlantic called the same work, “An entertaining, disturbing and inspiring book—a dazzling maturation.” Of “Local Souls”, Wells Tower wrote: “It leaves the reader surfeited with gifts. This is a book to be read for the minutely tuned music of Gurganus’s language, its lithe and wicked wit, its luminosity of vision—shining all the brighter for the heat of its compassion. No living writer knows more about how humans matter to each other. These are tales to make us whole.”
Gurganus’s first published story “Minor Heroism” appeared in theNew Yorker when he was twenty six. In 1974, this tale offered the first gay character that magazine had ever presented. In 1989, after seven years’ composition, Gurganus presented the novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters). This first book spent eight months on theNew York Times bestseller list; it became the subject of a New Yorkercartoon and remains a clue on “Jeopardy” (Names for $400). The novel has been translated into twelve languages and has sold over two million copies. The CBS adaptation of the work, starring Donald Sutherland and Diane Lane and won and a “Best Supporting Actress” Emmy for Cecily Tyson as the freed slave, Castalia.
Along with Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Gurganus’s works include White People, (Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Pen-Faulkner Finalist) as well as the novel Plays Well With Others. His last book was The Practical Heart: Four Novellas (Lambda Literary Award). Gurganus’s short fiction appears in the New Yorker, Harper’sand other magazines. A recent essay was seen in The New York Review of Books. His stories have been honored by the O’Henry Prize Stories, Best American Stories, and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Gurganus was a recent John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. His novella Blessed Assurance: A Moral Tale, from White People, has become part of the Harvard Business School’s Ethics curriculum. The work is discussed at length in Questions of Character (Harvard Business School Press) by Joseph L. Badaracco.
Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in 1947 to a teacher and businessman, Gurganus first trained as a painter, studying at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His paintings and drawings are represented in private and public collections. Gurganus has illustrated three limited editions of his fiction. During a three-year stint onboard the USS Yorktown during the Vietnam War, he turned to writing. Gurganus subsequently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where he’d gone to work with Grace Paley. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his mentors were Stanley Elkin and John Cheever. Mr. Gur
Fiction by Gurganus has inspired the greatest compliment of all: memorization and re-reading. The number of new critical works, the theatrical and film treatments of his fiction, testify to its durable urgency. Adaptations have won four Emmy. Robert Wilson of The American Scholar has called Gurganus “the rightful heir to Faulkner and Welty.” In a culture where `branding’ seems all-important, Gurganus has resisted any franchised repetition. Equally adept at stories and novels or novellas, his tone and sense of form can differ widely. On the page Gurganus continues to startle and grow.
Of his previous work “The Practical Heart”, critic Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times, “Masterly and deeply affecting…a testament to Mr. Gurganus’s ability to inhabit his characters’ inner lives and map their emotional histories.” The Atlantic called the same work, “An entertaining, disturbing and inspiring book—a dazzling maturation.” Of “Local Souls”, Wells Tower wrote: “It leaves the reader surfeited with gifts. This is a book to be read for the minutely tuned music of Gurganus’s language, its lithe and wicked wit, its luminosity of vision—shining all the brighter for the heat of its compassion. No living writer knows more about how humans matter to each other. These are tales to make us whole.”
Gurganus’s first published story “Minor Heroism” appeared in theNew Yorker when he was twenty six. In 1974, this tale offered the first gay character that magazine had ever presented. In 1989, after seven years’ composition, Gurganus presented the novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters). This first book spent eight months on theNew York Times bestseller list; it became the subject of a New Yorkercartoon and remains a clue on “Jeopardy” (Names for $400). The novel has been translated into twelve languages and has sold over two million copies. The CBS adaptation of the work, starring Donald Sutherland and Diane Lane and won and a “Best Supporting Actress” Emmy for Cecily Tyson as the freed slave, Castalia.
Along with Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Gurganus’s works include White People, (Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Pen-Faulkner Finalist) as well as the novel Plays Well With Others. His last book was The Practical Heart: Four Novellas (Lambda Literary Award). Gurganus’s short fiction appears in the New Yorker, Harper’sand other magazines. A recent essay was seen in The New York Review of Books. His stories have been honored by the O’Henry Prize Stories, Best American Stories, and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Gurganus was a recent John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. His novella Blessed Assurance: A Moral Tale, from White People, has become part of the Harvard Business School’s Ethics curriculum. The work is discussed at length in Questions of Character (Harvard Business School Press) by Joseph L. Badaracco.
Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in 1947 to a teacher and businessman, Gurganus first trained as a painter, studying at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His paintings and drawings are represented in private and public collections. Gurganus has illustrated three limited editions of his fiction. During a three-year stint onboard the USS Yorktown during the Vietnam War, he turned to writing. Gurganus subsequently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where he’d gone to work with Grace Paley. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his mentors were Stanley Elkin and John Cheever. Mr. Gur
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 85 reviews
December 3, 2018
You know you've read a good book when at its conclusion you feel as though you lived another life. Alan Gurganus brings us to the Manhattan of the late seventies, early eighties, and introduces us to a coterie of aspiring artists. Arriving to New York from the hinterlands, these young novices live, in some cases, on the fringes of poverty. And yet they are wholly dedicated to hone their various crafts until they obtain public acknowledgement of their worth as artists. To these young guns the big city is an exciting playground where they not only work but play hard as well. Unfortunately the events described take place at the beginning of the Aids crises and most of the main characters are homosexual. The narrator is himself gay, but as survivor of the worst of the epidemic, he remains to tell the tale; a story both humorous and tragic. The cutting down of a young and gifted generation in their prime...in some cases before they achieve the recognition they so earnestly desire, is poignantly told without sentimentality. The author's narrative style is reminiscent of "stream of consciousness" in that the pattern is often very much like halting conversation as one thought intrudes upon another. At the end, I felt as if I'd been there and I was grateful for the experience.
January 19, 2011
A eulogy for the NY West Village creative community decimated in the 80s, told by a gifted storyteller. Gurganus is gregarious in style, unrelenting in sharing the ego, bonhomie and tragedy of the decade. He lets us sit at the special green marble round table at Ossorio's under the statue of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and live vicariously the heady personal art world of the young and fabulous, transplanted from the inherited world of golf courses, debutantes, family farms to a bright fast-burning destiny in the Big Apple. Sparkling highs and terrible loss written with heart and precision. A great read.
July 22, 2011
If you ever find yourself in the Marriott in Coralville, IA, check out their little library room. Since Iowa City is the home of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, they have a library filled with books from authors who have attended the workshop in years past. I found this book, read a quarter of it on my last night in Coralville, then promptly downloaded it to my Kindle to finish it.
In 1984, I was living in Janesville, WI, and I was in 4th grade. The AIDS epidemic had blown up enough that even folks in the flyover states were aware of it, and it scared them silly. My aunt and uncle, being ultra-conservative, were scared silly and did something about it by sending my parents a box of "literature" to help us to understand the scourge of The Gays and how AIDS was going to kill us all. I loved books and reading material like nothing else, even at that young of an age, so getting an entire box of books in the mail was like Christmas in July. Except...these books were hateful, horrible, dreadful things. Even my parents, who are still very conservative, were discomforted by the hate dripping off every page, and all that literature went right into the trash.
I kept thinking while reading this book, that if only this book had somehow been published ahead of the AIDS crisis, somehow, some way. If only the love and the understanding and the portraying of the art culture and the gay culture in NYC in the early 80s that is present in this book were somehow spread to the good people of the Midwest, and the unsure everywhere, then perhaps some of the fear-mongering and treatment of gay people and people with AIDS would have been lessened. Wishful thinking, I know.
But, reading this book took away some of the bad taste in my mouth from that long-ago trashed box of garbage-words. Alan Gurganus has a way with words, and I'm looking foraward to reading everything else he's ever published.
In 1984, I was living in Janesville, WI, and I was in 4th grade. The AIDS epidemic had blown up enough that even folks in the flyover states were aware of it, and it scared them silly. My aunt and uncle, being ultra-conservative, were scared silly and did something about it by sending my parents a box of "literature" to help us to understand the scourge of The Gays and how AIDS was going to kill us all. I loved books and reading material like nothing else, even at that young of an age, so getting an entire box of books in the mail was like Christmas in July. Except...these books were hateful, horrible, dreadful things. Even my parents, who are still very conservative, were discomforted by the hate dripping off every page, and all that literature went right into the trash.
I kept thinking while reading this book, that if only this book had somehow been published ahead of the AIDS crisis, somehow, some way. If only the love and the understanding and the portraying of the art culture and the gay culture in NYC in the early 80s that is present in this book were somehow spread to the good people of the Midwest, and the unsure everywhere, then perhaps some of the fear-mongering and treatment of gay people and people with AIDS would have been lessened. Wishful thinking, I know.
But, reading this book took away some of the bad taste in my mouth from that long-ago trashed box of garbage-words. Alan Gurganus has a way with words, and I'm looking foraward to reading everything else he's ever published.
February 28, 2021
Don't really remember this from reading it before, and I felt frustrated with Gurganus' style — which is florid and indirect— and some sentences even had four dashes in them — which makes the text feel choppy and under-baked. (I just tried to imitate multiple dashes but could only manage three). On page 291 the character Robert gives an assessment of the writer character's style, and I thought the critique was dead on, but as a meta-critique of this novel!
Resented having to do so much work for only an occasional pay-off. However after finishing (skipping the appendix, as everyone seems to do) the text is still resonating. Overwritten, overwrought, under-baked and overlong. But resonant, if you can force your way through the jungle.
Resented having to do so much work for only an occasional pay-off. However after finishing (skipping the appendix, as everyone seems to do) the text is still resonating. Overwritten, overwrought, under-baked and overlong. But resonant, if you can force your way through the jungle.
June 4, 2023
I agree with both the 5-star reviews and the 2-star reviews. This guy is a very good writer, can turn a phrase like few others. I agree with the 5-stars that there is an immediacy and intimacy to this book that is addictive. I also agree with the 2-stars that the story misses a cohesiveness and direction, and it doesn’t quite live up to the prologue, which is perhaps the best opening of all time. Gurganus is definitely some kind of genius, but often goes down the wrong path, for me.
June 12, 2020
Page 35
Only in retrospect do we ever really understand how we actually looked. The young ones who learned that at the time can be rendered whores by overknowing. Whores, or actors.
Page 91
The look you gave me was God Viewing A Bug.
Page 103
… driving all over creation admiring green fields made interesting because we owned them.
Page 122
May had turned him a deeper cinnamon-toast brown and his eyebrows were bleached half-white and it made the eyes below go a scarier and colder blue so it was like staring through his skull and out to sea through his porthole skull.
Page 175
(Long passage quoted from Emily Post’s Etiquette)
Don’t dwell on the details of illness or the manner of death; don’t quote endlessly from the poets and Scriptures. Remember that eyes filmed with tears and an aching heart can not follow rhetorical lengths of writing.
Page 181
The only thing I haven’t done for you is oral sex because I have no aptitude for working with that little. I do convex only.
Page 191
Robert found and forced on me Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. “It’s a real page turner,“ he said, “you’ll want to see how it all turns out.“ Robert explained that Defoe had not personally experienced the plague he’d put on record. He had interviewed old, old survivors, he used published memoirs and the public lists of deaths. Defoe’s book was like Stephen Crane’s acrid, honest account of Civil War battle; sometimes the best records get written by those listening kids born one generation late.
Page 280
There are the simple skills you feel proud off. There are hard–won abilities you’d rather not have. Skills I’ve hated developing? A half-psychic ability to hear in the breathing of sick friends how long they have to live.
Page 293
One day on the subway, I stood reading how Reinhold Niebuhr, asked to define Sainthood, answered, “the spouses of saints.“
Only in retrospect do we ever really understand how we actually looked. The young ones who learned that at the time can be rendered whores by overknowing. Whores, or actors.
Page 91
The look you gave me was God Viewing A Bug.
Page 103
… driving all over creation admiring green fields made interesting because we owned them.
Page 122
May had turned him a deeper cinnamon-toast brown and his eyebrows were bleached half-white and it made the eyes below go a scarier and colder blue so it was like staring through his skull and out to sea through his porthole skull.
Page 175
(Long passage quoted from Emily Post’s Etiquette)
Don’t dwell on the details of illness or the manner of death; don’t quote endlessly from the poets and Scriptures. Remember that eyes filmed with tears and an aching heart can not follow rhetorical lengths of writing.
Page 181
The only thing I haven’t done for you is oral sex because I have no aptitude for working with that little. I do convex only.
Page 191
Robert found and forced on me Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. “It’s a real page turner,“ he said, “you’ll want to see how it all turns out.“ Robert explained that Defoe had not personally experienced the plague he’d put on record. He had interviewed old, old survivors, he used published memoirs and the public lists of deaths. Defoe’s book was like Stephen Crane’s acrid, honest account of Civil War battle; sometimes the best records get written by those listening kids born one generation late.
Page 280
There are the simple skills you feel proud off. There are hard–won abilities you’d rather not have. Skills I’ve hated developing? A half-psychic ability to hear in the breathing of sick friends how long they have to live.
Page 293
One day on the subway, I stood reading how Reinhold Niebuhr, asked to define Sainthood, answered, “the spouses of saints.“
October 13, 2014
I had such high hopes for this book and they were never realized. It started out well enough with Robert in the hospital and his dear friend collecting dildos and kiddie porn from his apartment before his parents arrived. I expected the characters to develop and the story to grow. For me, that did not happen. The characters fell flat when they had the potential to be so much more in a city, in a time that was bigger than life. Sadly I gave this two stars when my expectation was that it would live up to its 5 star recommendation. Sorely disappointed.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 19, 2009
Micro review: Gurganus has a great, somewhat lyrical style that propels the tapestry of vignettes that comprise this novel; that said, he tips his narrative hand in the first 30 pages and you spend the next 450 pages playing a sort of emotional defense.
A few miscellaneous points:
(1) RE: "vignettes" (v.s.): it took me a while to see how the different scenes fit together into a novelistic arc. It isn't that the vignettes are unrelated or disconnected (viz. they're unified by narrator and (for the most part) by place) just that a few feel like non-sequiturs.
(2) RE: "emotional defense" (v.s.): spending the first section relating to us the final comic catastrophe of one beloved friend dying of HIV means one (and only one thing) when followed by a deep flashback: it means you're going to spend hundreds of pages telling us in fine-grained detail the life stories that might otherwise be relayed in a hundred. And you drag it out and fill it with detail because you want me to get emotionally invested in this motley group that we already know is going to die, one by one.
(3) But Gurganus does have a good style, and it comes across here pretty strongly.
A few miscellaneous points:
(1) RE: "vignettes" (v.s.): it took me a while to see how the different scenes fit together into a novelistic arc. It isn't that the vignettes are unrelated or disconnected (viz. they're unified by narrator and (for the most part) by place) just that a few feel like non-sequiturs.
(2) RE: "emotional defense" (v.s.): spending the first section relating to us the final comic catastrophe of one beloved friend dying of HIV means one (and only one thing) when followed by a deep flashback: it means you're going to spend hundreds of pages telling us in fine-grained detail the life stories that might otherwise be relayed in a hundred. And you drag it out and fill it with detail because you want me to get emotionally invested in this motley group that we already know is going to die, one by one.
(3) But Gurganus does have a good style, and it comes across here pretty strongly.
June 3, 2010
Gurganus is probably one of the most self aware, yet uncompromising authors I've ever come across. He knows that he has so much to offer, yet he also knows he gets sidetracked, then he tells you he knows this and that you can fuck off if you don't like it. For the most part I loved 'Plays Well with Others" but there was one seriously important part of the book that made me want to throw it at the wall: Robert.
If Hartley is the soul of the story and Angie is the heart, then Robert is the blood that pumps through it's veins. And he is worshiped in a similar regard.
For me Robert was more like a menstrual cycle. Everybody makes a huge deal out of him, but in the end he just worries you by showing up late and makes you want to curl up in a ball with a bottle of wine in your belly.
I was given reasons to love Angie.
I was not given reason to love Robert.
And his reckless actions toward the end of the book not only solidified my ambiguity, they set me on the rails to full on hatred.
But without Robert, you wouldn't have some of the most spectacular lines ever to be published about friendship and family. So I guess if the period had to come to make way for the baby then I'll take the whole package with smirk and a shake of the head.
If Hartley is the soul of the story and Angie is the heart, then Robert is the blood that pumps through it's veins. And he is worshiped in a similar regard.
For me Robert was more like a menstrual cycle. Everybody makes a huge deal out of him, but in the end he just worries you by showing up late and makes you want to curl up in a ball with a bottle of wine in your belly.
I was given reasons to love Angie.
I was not given reason to love Robert.
And his reckless actions toward the end of the book not only solidified my ambiguity, they set me on the rails to full on hatred.
But without Robert, you wouldn't have some of the most spectacular lines ever to be published about friendship and family. So I guess if the period had to come to make way for the baby then I'll take the whole package with smirk and a shake of the head.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 2, 2011
this may be the most enjoyable book ive ever read to date. has the rare pleasure of being read more than once. the characters are amusing - simple enough to relate to, complex enough to be interesting. story has a level of honesty ive never seen in any other book. highly recommended. everyone should read it in order to humanize the aids crisis & community (which by the time finish the book, you will understand its marginality is a myth). despite the harsh theme, its a very very funny read. im going to read it to my cats.
June 1, 2008
Unlike his previous efforts in 'Oldest Confederate Widow' and 'White People', Gurganus falls flat in this messy AIDS-era novel.
The characters never seem fully fleshed out, the story misses a cohesiveness or direction.
The promise of the opening pages, a very funny scene on the public transit system involving a grocery bag of sex toys seems to be the only memorable bit of prose Gurganus could offer in this missed attempt to define the AIDS crisis.
The characters never seem fully fleshed out, the story misses a cohesiveness or direction.
The promise of the opening pages, a very funny scene on the public transit system involving a grocery bag of sex toys seems to be the only memorable bit of prose Gurganus could offer in this missed attempt to define the AIDS crisis.
February 11, 2018
It's crazy to think that the AIDS epidemic was at its peak around the time that I was born, and that so many lives were lost before we learned how to keep its symptoms in check. That being said, a book about something so moving should have moved me, but I barely shed a tear as the inevitable decline of Hartley's circle takes its toll. Hard to get through...maybe it was the style, or maybe Hartley's narrative. Kept with it because it was a decent enough story.
July 13, 2013
Gurganus walks a tightrope between the comic and the tragic in this beautiful (if sometimes indulgent) story about a small cadre of artists at the start of the AIDS pandemic. Plays Well with Others is written with such confidence, and such poetic prose, it's hard to deny the level of Gurganus's genius. There's real pathos here and real humor, like so much of life
November 20, 2007
I love this book. It is so sad with unexpected raunchy and funny mix ins; its about when AIDS hit the queer community in NYC. It's one of my favorites. I've read it several times. But a friend stole my copy.
January 31, 2008
Another one for my all time favorite book list. It's been about 10 years since I read this book and I plan to pick it up again soon. It's a story of friendship in NYC during the 1980s, The backdrop to the story is the AIDS crisis but it's beyond that. It's about a triangle of friends...
August 14, 2009
perhaps my all-time favorite book... the story reads like an autobiography with a feeling of immediacy and intimacy that is hard to find in fiction... although it is a fictionalized account, it seems to provide an insight into the onset of AIDS in the 80s.
July 8, 2010
The best first-person novel about the AIDS epidemic and its effects on an entire community in New York City in the 80's. Funny and fast-reading, heartbreaking. I finished this book and put my head down on my knees and bawled my eyes out. I re-read it at least once a year.
November 16, 2014
Really worked hard to like this book about NY before, during and after the AIDS crisis took out so many artistic young men. A novel, but despite the good reviews, found is a shlep and gave up after a hundred pages. Could see it as a funny movie.
February 18, 2010
One of the most important books in my life. The writing is absolutely gorgeous. Heartbreaking and hopeful at the same time.
June 30, 2010
One of my favoritos. The protagonist is so raw and vulnerable that you are instantly enamored.
September 24, 2011
I couldn't finish this. Gurganus is a talented, but self-indulgent writer, unable to resist digression. Also violates my rule against novels where the main character describes his penis!
December 28, 2012
Love this book - I re-read it every few years. I think it evokes the AIDS crisis in real people's lives without being maudlin. It's really about the power of friendship.
March 21, 2017
Interesting picture of the author's life in a gay community in NYC leading up to and including the AIDS epidemic. A little long for my taste; thought it could use some editing.
September 1, 2019
Found this in a thrift shop's shelves, was arrested by the cover ( not the one here on Goodreads -- the one with the devilish little boy cartoon). It's about 3 young artists meeting and making their way in Manhattan in the 80's. It's about gay men and cruising, and later, AIDS. It seems to be about half memoir and half fiction. Maybe mostly memoir, with significant characters condensed from multiple real-life people into single fictional ones.
Gurganus has a tendency to go off into indigo clouds of prose that sometimes work and sometimes *are* work to read. But he kept my attention throughout, and I enjoyed his depiction of "his" New York. As an ex-New Yorker, I'm always interested in what someone else's version of it was like--because everyone's version is different.
But the book shambles. Could have used some tightening up. And one of the main three characters is someone the reader never really gets to know from the inside; only as an object of beauty seen from the outside. This strikes me as a wasted opportunity, despite the welcome surprise of this "object" being a beautiful man rather than a beautiful woman.
The ending is over-long and so, weak. Ends more with a trickle of remembrance than with a clean fictional bang.
Recommended if you are looking for a portrait of gay culture in NYC in the early 80's. The author doesn't dwell on the big picture of the AIDS crisis, but on the narrator's status as a caretaker to his dying friends. So it's sad of course, but it's not "Angels in America" hardcore tragedy.
There are some funny bits, some raunchy bits, and some beautiful passages. You might like it.
Gurganus has a tendency to go off into indigo clouds of prose that sometimes work and sometimes *are* work to read. But he kept my attention throughout, and I enjoyed his depiction of "his" New York. As an ex-New Yorker, I'm always interested in what someone else's version of it was like--because everyone's version is different.
But the book shambles. Could have used some tightening up. And one of the main three characters is someone the reader never really gets to know from the inside; only as an object of beauty seen from the outside. This strikes me as a wasted opportunity, despite the welcome surprise of this "object" being a beautiful man rather than a beautiful woman.
The ending is over-long and so, weak. Ends more with a trickle of remembrance than with a clean fictional bang.
Recommended if you are looking for a portrait of gay culture in NYC in the early 80's. The author doesn't dwell on the big picture of the AIDS crisis, but on the narrator's status as a caretaker to his dying friends. So it's sad of course, but it's not "Angels in America" hardcore tragedy.
There are some funny bits, some raunchy bits, and some beautiful passages. You might like it.
May 22, 2021
Plays Well with Others, Allan Gurganus's second novel, is a tale of a generation of bright young things who left their lives in the heartland and moved to New York City, for art and freedom. But this generation is the one that was ravaged by the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s.
It is a compelling story, or it would have been, in the hands of a better writer. I nearly quit reading it without finishing it several times. The characters were fairly well drawn, and I think I felt an obligation to see their stories through.
The structure and language of the book are casual, with some jumping back and forth in time and location. That's fine, but it's apparently harder to do well than it looks; Gurganus unfortunately sacrifices the pace that might have moved the reader along in the story. Sometimes the book seems endless, but it's only a little over 300 pages. An editor should have exercised a firmer hand, perhaps, and this reader also expected a paperback edition to have had the errors proofread out by that advanced stage. Several words were wrongly chosen: discrete for discreet, sited for sighted, role for roll.
The reader who wants to understand the emotions of the youth of that dreadful time will be fairly well served by Plays Well with Others, but there are probably many other authors who have conveyed the story better than Gurganus.
It is a compelling story, or it would have been, in the hands of a better writer. I nearly quit reading it without finishing it several times. The characters were fairly well drawn, and I think I felt an obligation to see their stories through.
The structure and language of the book are casual, with some jumping back and forth in time and location. That's fine, but it's apparently harder to do well than it looks; Gurganus unfortunately sacrifices the pace that might have moved the reader along in the story. Sometimes the book seems endless, but it's only a little over 300 pages. An editor should have exercised a firmer hand, perhaps, and this reader also expected a paperback edition to have had the errors proofread out by that advanced stage. Several words were wrongly chosen: discrete for discreet, sited for sighted, role for roll.
The reader who wants to understand the emotions of the youth of that dreadful time will be fairly well served by Plays Well with Others, but there are probably many other authors who have conveyed the story better than Gurganus.
September 3, 2018
So-so book. It was like walking into the coffee shop and meeting new friends who accept you as part of their group but you feel awkward and don't quite understand the way they talk, their inside jokes, or their relationship to each other and who likes who this week. It's the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and just as you feel you're getting to know these people they start getting sick and dying at an amazing rate, until finally only one is left.
I will say that the ending caught me off guard: even though I knew what the outcome was going to be it was still touching in a way I wasn't expecting.
I don't think New York would ever be the place for me but there was enough grit within this tale to hold my attention to the end, despite feeling like the outsider on a number of levels.
I will say that the ending caught me off guard: even though I knew what the outcome was going to be it was still touching in a way I wasn't expecting.
I don't think New York would ever be the place for me but there was enough grit within this tale to hold my attention to the end, despite feeling like the outsider on a number of levels.
May 6, 2018
I struggled through this book. Gurganus’ style of writing, with choppy sentences, was difficult for me and I found myself skipping paragraphs just to find something to grasp on to. I think the story of the AIDS epidemic is a good one but the presentation fell flat for me.
I haven’t read Confederate Widow yet so maybe that will be more to my liking. I’m trying to read Gurganus’ works since my husband has become an acquaintance of his at the small village post office where he now resides. I recognized Hartley’s NC home, with U-shaped porch overlooking a graveyard, a church with a spire and a volunteer fire department just blocks away, being Gurganus’ actual home.
I haven’t read Confederate Widow yet so maybe that will be more to my liking. I’m trying to read Gurganus’ works since my husband has become an acquaintance of his at the small village post office where he now resides. I recognized Hartley’s NC home, with U-shaped porch overlooking a graveyard, a church with a spire and a volunteer fire department just blocks away, being Gurganus’ actual home.
May 25, 2019
I had a really hard time getting through this book. I’ve read several books about the AIDS crisis and it’s a topic of huge interest for me but I found myself skipping paragraphs because they just dragged on and on. I was waiting to get to something interesting - something, anything. I understand the author wanted to give detail about NYC, friendships, love and loss and how the horrible disease impacted all but due to the style of writing, it lost my interest completely. This is the first book that I abandoned after 300 pages.
November 24, 2020
You know how you collect random books through means you don't know? This book was in my tbr pile of books that I own (and have moved multiple times with, so I'll be damned if I don't read them) and decided to pick it up. I was really glad I did.
The writing style got to me a little bit, but other than that, this book is excellent. I did get bored at times, but by the end, it picks up. Excellent depiction of the toll the AIDS epidemic took on those who lived through it in the 80s.
The writing style got to me a little bit, but other than that, this book is excellent. I did get bored at times, but by the end, it picks up. Excellent depiction of the toll the AIDS epidemic took on those who lived through it in the 80s.
July 30, 2025
This book is a hidden gem I count myself lucky to have found in the used books section in the basement of my local independent bookshop. The opening had me laughing out loud, and the rest of the book continued to elicit an equally spirited response from me, at times of amusement and at times of sorrow. Gurganus tells a beautiful tale of friendship, grief, and memory in this unique love story, and I highly recommend this book to others. I'd give it a sixth star if I could.
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