Plays Well With Others

Allan Gurganus

This book was difficult to get into. It starts off with the narrator telling you that all his friends died from AIDS and he was the only one of his group that survived. But that wasn't the reason it was difficult to get into the story. It was more because the story was written in a conversational-like manner or somewhat like a diary. Sometimes the story seemed a bit disjointed, or there were in-jokes with references that flew over my head. It took me three tries to finally get into it. And I'm glad I stuck with it. It's a wonderful, unsentimental story of one Hartley Mims Jr who leaves Iowa Falls for New York to become a writer. There, he meets fellow aspirants in the arts fields and they form a circle who work, party, work, party, work, party. This is set just before the world found out about AIDS. And so, the story tracks the relationships between these people, their trek towards, hopefully, the big-time, the events in between, and the eventual price they had to pay. This story sometimes felt like an episodical TV series. It was often witty, and sometimes, unexpectedly touching. What impressed me most it was the strength of friendship between these people, and how well it was portrayed, not through words professing the quality of their friendship but shown through events chronicling their times together. I loved it.