This is my first Kramer's novel...I just read the first few pages and I like it!
I found myself greatly frustrated with the many made up names, for I could usually not tell which characters were real/historical, and which were wholly fictional. I am also disappointed that, after all these years of waiting for a history with footnotes and references, we are left with a large novel devoid of both. I am slogging through this poignant book, but I had hoped for much more.
If Larry Kramer didn't exist, we would have had to invent him! And fortunately he does exist: apart from the anger and the excesses, he has done immeasurable good with the Gay Men's Health Crisis and Act Up, not to mention a stand-up job of transposing D.H. Lawrence's Women In Love to the screen (an amazing title, considering that it is really much more about two men in love who don't dare admit to it, quite).
People don't come to Larry Kramer for lessons in discretion, they come for entertainment and revelation. They are not often disappointed!
Here’s hoping that he will be able to finish Volume 2.
People don't come to Larry Kramer for lessons in discretion, they come for entertainment and revelation. They are not often disappointed!
Here’s hoping that he will be able to finish Volume 2.
2
Why is his incessant nastiness towards so many other people and his insistence on calling every admired historical personage gay more admirable than lies about gays? Since his old days of outing gays for trivial reasons, he has not become a better human being.
4
Kramer implies with his every word that he has acquired ownership of AIDS and therefore of everything that is gay including its history and all of its legacies. He might have been right about AIDS but he has always been wrong about everything else about being gay. He is an intemperate bore who has always been on the outside looking in and cannot pretend to understand the love and humor which has always eluded him.
7
Garner's casually vicious review is such a surprise. "Like an old toilet, it is easily clogged." How did that get by any sense of fair play?
3
775 pages?!?! My molecular cell bio book wasn't that long. I admire Kramer and his sanity, but the tepid review just made me tired thinking of the feeling conveyed by the reviewer over 775 pages.
2
Bring on volume 2!
1
I've managed to go through life without knowing exactly who Larry Kramer is (although, of course, I had heard the name), and now that I've read this review of his novel (if Garner hadn't identified it as such up front, I don't think I'd quite understand from the rest of the review that it IS a novel), I'll be happy to go through the rest of my life in the same state of ignorance. When asked about what book they're most ashamed not to have read, most noted authors interviewed by the Times mention WAR AND PEACE. Now that we know that Tolstoy was gay (We don't? Oh, did Mr. Kramer neglect listing him along with Benjamin Franklin and George Washington just because he wasn't American? No matter, he surely meant to include him in the Historic International Correspondence Section with all of Mr. Kramer's other betters), not to have read it will constitute yet another attack on The Gay Community, for which no more embarrassing excuse for a representative than Mr. Kramer is likely to emerge. Oy!
3
Bring on volume 2!
1
If a review is supposed to help the reader make up his or her mind about whether to invest time and energy in a book, this review did its job perfectly.
12
Life in the Village of Cranford is beginning to sound more appealing than ever and the gossip more enticing.
1
I wished I had read the review before I bought the book. It's the most unreadable book I've ever delved into. And I'm not going to finish it because I have limited time to spend with crap, its not required reading, and I've spent enough time with his anger against everyone except his own "Act Up."
1
Oh thank God! I thought it was me, I thought I was just not sophisticated enough for all of the incomprehensible ramblings in this crazy book. I feel now I have permission not to finish it. I kept on going out of respect for Mr. Kramer, but the more I read the more I lost respect for him.
The reviewer didn't really liken the book to a toilet, did he?
1
Only a clogged one. And in the cloacal flow of this review, that might be taken as a compliment.
3
Sometimes self-indulgence results in a work of art, and sometimes it is just embarrassing.
9
I read the book in bound galleys and concur with everything the reviewer says. It really is a dreary, sluggish read. I'm a gay man and the book's endless sex talk isn't fun, it's mean and joyless. The whole thing is a shapeless, pointless mess. Maybe we have to wait until volume two to learn what the point is. The AIDS epidemic doesn't even strike in this volume, although it does appear as one of the many narrators, something called the Underlying Condition.
13
I wish I were a faster reader as, notwithstanding his being so irritating, I do like knowing what Kramer is up to. But, as the character in Boys in the Band says, I'm still reading Atlas Shrugged, which I started in 1912.
Ah for the days of Reader's Digest condensations!
Ah for the days of Reader's Digest condensations!
4
Kramer is the equal-opportunity embarrassment you love to dread, an ironist of himself before anyone else. But there's no doubt of his usefulness to his times. By the way, The Times, which has long brought up the rear in the nomenclature of movements and peoples, could well respect the orthographic propriety of printing the acronym for the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power as its founders, followers, and innocent bystanders have always done, ACT UP.
6
"Is man no more than this, mark him well."
Come on Dwight. " a grand diva of a book"
how embarrassing. Mr. Kramer's attack of the NY Times
couldn't be anymore appropriate today.
how embarrassing. Mr. Kramer's attack of the NY Times
couldn't be anymore appropriate today.
6
Bravo for Mr. Kramer! The smiting of vicious piety is always worthwhile reading if for no other reason than to keep it in mind lest oneself be tempted to indulge.
5
Obviously, this is a novel that is reviewer proof. Whoever Dwight Garner is, his review reveals him to be a bit perplexed and at a loss to describe it. I don't think dropping names like William T. Vollman and Thomas Pynchon here is very helpful to anyone or relevant to Kramer's writing. Anyone who's read Larry Kramer's previous novel "Faggots" (1978) will already be used to Kramer's manic style, which is all its own, for better or worse. Not to mention his apropos character names. The fact of the matter is, we'll never know who in History was gay or otherwise until someone invents a time machine and goes back in time to sleep with them all. In the absence of that time machine, I welcome Kramer's book. This will be Required Reading for some of us.
5
Actually, the review knows exactly what he's talking about. Underneath the excesses of Faggots was a strong, solid novel. Underneath the excesses of this one is nothing but mess and mystery. Go ahead and buy a copy, but you'll be sorry.
6
I unfortunately bought the book before reading the reviews here. I relied on the interview in OUT. What a mess of a book. A good editor would have cut 650 pages from this "magnum opus."
1
I'm sure the reviewer didn't intend to, but he made Kramer's book sound fascinating. I will buy a copy.
9
I had the same reaction.
Being gay is okay but there are other things to think about in life. Seems an honest book that allows people to see daily life from the perspective of a gay person or couple would be a better use of reading time.
7
I think you might want to put yourself in Larry Kramer's shoes. He has lived through an era when being gay was something to be despised, he fought and raged against a city and a government who did nothing about the plague causing so much devastation (AIDS only became a national concern when heteros started to die from it). Mr. Kramer's works are deliberately polemical because for too long, the only way people would listen is if he screamed at them.
It is a wonderful and terrible thing to be able to say what you've said, but to quote George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". This is Larry Kramer's way of making sure we - straight, gay, transgender and every variation between, don't forget.
It is a wonderful and terrible thing to be able to say what you've said, but to quote George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". This is Larry Kramer's way of making sure we - straight, gay, transgender and every variation between, don't forget.
19
AIDS only become a national concern when upper-middle class white men started to die from it. Now that it's a Third World disease, the American gay community isn't much interested in it.
5
Mr. Kramer, and those like him who blame the AIDS epidemic on an un-caring, bigoted government, seem to conveniently forget much. When public health agencies tried to raise the alarm about what came to be known as AIDS, the gay community denounced them as fascist liars who just couldn't stand the idea of gay men having so much fun while while practicing stunning sexual promiscuity. The bath houses and gay bars, and the gay newspapers dependent on them for advertising, were making far too much money to do anything that might stop the party.
2