A captivating tragicomedy that celebrates the lives lost to AIDS.
A gay man gets roped into taking care of an obstreperous, AIDS-stricken co-worker and finds the drudgery unexpectedly fulfilling in this mordantly funny coming-of-age novel.
Willett’s novel unfolds in Manhattan circa 1986, where 27-year-old bookstore supervisor Eric Summerfield feels himself a failure as a gay man: He dresses unstylishly, stays home watching TV with his cat at night because he finds socializing an ordeal, and is so awkward during sex that he’s been celibate for four years. Bookstore clerk Dale Corcoran, a flamboyant social butterfly, is Eric’s only friend, but he undermines Eric so consistently—he invites him to a party, then greets him at the door with “you look a little haggard”—that Eric starts avoiding him, too. But when Dale contracts AIDS and is abandoned by friends and estranged from his family, he calls Eric for help in dealing with the ravages of the illness. Fighting his urge to flee, Eric nurses Dale through vomiting and diarrhea, hospitalizations, progressive blindness, creeping dementia, and relentless wasting—and finds that the burden fitfully drags him out of his isolation and reinvests him in life. (Further perking him up is Dale’s replacement, a gorgeous young man who is ostensibly straight but seems to hint at other proclivities.) Willett depicts Dale’s illness in unflinching detail but avoids maudlin sentimentality—almost until the end, Dale remains a spirited, bitchy, shrewd, and charismatic man, and his and Eric’s recollections paint a vibrant portrait of gay life in the late 1970s. Writing with a hangdog wit (“was it maybe true that the only way Eric could feel relaxed at a party was if the host had a terminal illness?”), Willett manages the difficult task of making an AIDS story funny; then, through a skillful accretion of matter-of-fact details, he vividly conveys the pathos of Dale’s decline and Eric’s fumbling, tender response. Readers will be laughing through their tears.
A captivating tragicomedy that celebrates the lives lost to AIDS.Pub Date: June 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798992339819
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Magic Show Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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