Plays Well with Others
by Allan Gurganus
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In his widely read, prizewinning Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus gave fresh meaning to an overexplored American moment: 1860-65. He now turns that comic intensity and historical vision to another war zone: entry-level artistic Manhattan 1980-95. In his first novel since Widow, Gurganus offers us an indelible, addictive praise-song to New York's wild recent days, their invigorating peaks and lethal crashes. It's 1980, and Hartley Mims jr., a somewhat overbred show more Southerner, arrives in town to found his artistic career and find a Circle of brilliant friends. He soon discovers both Robert Christian Gustafson, archangelic boy composer of Symphony no. 1: The Titanic, and Alabama Byrnes, a failed Savannah debutante whose gigantic paintings reveal an outsized talent that she, five feet tall, can't always live up to. This circle--sexually venturesome, frequently hungry, hooked on courage, caffeine, and the promise of immortality--makes history and most everybody else. Their dramatic moment in New York history might've been a collaboration begun, as a toast, by Cole Porter and finished, as pure elegy, by Poe himself. Plays Well with Others is a fairy tale. It has a Legend's indoctrinating charm and hidden terrors. It chronicles a ragtag group of gifted kids who come to seek their fortunes; they find the low-paying joys of making art and the heady education only multiple erotic partners can provide. Having mythologized each other through the boom years, having commenced becoming "names," they suddenly encounter a brand-new disease like something out of fifth-rate sci-fi. Friends are soon questioning how much they really owe each other; they're left with the ancient consolation of one another's company and help. We watch this egotistic circle forge its single greatest masterwork: a healthy community. The novel, a sort of disco requiem-mass, divides itself into three symphonic movements: "Before," "After," and "After After." The work concludes in a homemade paradise that resembles Hartley Mims's own starter vision of all that seemed waiting--latent and convivial--in New York itself. This is a work that could've only been written now, in our age of medical advances, written about these unsuspecting unsung heroes of a medieval scourge's first endgame moves among us. Plays Well with Others becomes a hymn to the joys and woes of caretaking (for waning parents and young friends). Allan Gurganus has created a deeply engaging narrative about flawed, well-meaning people who seem lifted from our own address books. His book offers an obsessive love story, a complex vision of our recent past, and an emotional firestorm--a pandemic's long-awaited great novel. show lessTags
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Vibrant and artful, this is one of those novels that thrives off the voice of the narrator, and moves quickly from page one on. More based in anecdotes of lives than in a straightforward history, the book pieces together the New York based lives of three friends, all artists in a world that is just getting accustomed to the presence of AIDS. While I might have wished for more knowledge of the friends' lives before they moved to New York, the book lives in the present place, and perhaps that's the point--their lives really began in New York.
This is a long book, but Gurganus' wonderful humor and writing, and his fabulous characters, all bring the novel to life in such a way that it rarely flags. And, simply, the book is a heartfelt show more pleasure, well worth the time. Truly entertaining. show less
This is a long book, but Gurganus' wonderful humor and writing, and his fabulous characters, all bring the novel to life in such a way that it rarely flags. And, simply, the book is a heartfelt show more pleasure, well worth the time. Truly entertaining. show less
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Author Information
30+ Works 2,953 Members
In 1966, as a conscientious objector faced with possible charges of draft evasion during the Vietnam War, Allan Gurganus found himself on a four-year tour as a message decoder on an aircraft carrier. While at sea, Gurganus, who had studied to be a painter, developed the idea for his first successful novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All show more (1989) after reading an article that described how Confederate veterans were granted pensions in the 1880s, making them prime marital candidates for much younger women. The novel features Lucy Marsden, a feisty ninety-nine-year-old North Carolina widow, and spans the 1850s to the 1980s. Gurganus's subsequent books include Blessed Assurance: A Moral Tale (1989), The Practical Heart (1993), and Plays Well With Others (1997). He has written a number of short stories that have appeared in periodicals such as Granta, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper's, and Paris Review, and in books such as The Faber Book of Short Gay Fiction (1991). Eleven of his short stories are collected in The White People (1991). Gurganus was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1947 and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College (B.A., 1972) and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop (M.F.A., 1974). He has taught fiction writing at University of Iowa, Stanford University, Duke University, Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has had his paintings displayed in many private and public collections. (Bowker Author Biography) Allan Gurganus lives in a small town in North Carolina. The title novella of this book won the National Magazine Prize, & his other honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, & the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. (Publisher Provided) show less
Awards and Honors
Awards
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1997
- People/Characters
- Hartley Mims, Jr.; Robert Christian Gustafson; Angelina "Alabama" Byrnes; Gideon; Marco
- Important places
- New York, New York, USA; Falls, North Carolina, USA; Florida, USA
- Epigraph
- During the terrible years of Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in the prison queues of Leningrad. One day someone recognized me. Then a woman with lips blue form cold who was standing behind me, and of course had neve... (show all)r heard my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear (we spoke in whispers there): "Can you describe this?" I said, "I can!" Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face. --Anna Akhmatova, "Requiem"
- Dedication
- For Tobias Schneebaum and Joe Caldwell, friends, artists, and two beloved heroes of our recent siege.
- First words
- There are just two kinds of people in the world: those who will help you and those who won't.
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- Members
- 308
- Popularity
- 103,813
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.99)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 9
- ASINs
- 3
