About Ed

The masterly latest from Glück, whose novel Margery Kempe was reissued by NYRB Classics in 2020, examines sex, death, and literature through the story of his friend's death from AIDS. "Reader, allow me to erect a monument inside you," Glück begins. That monument is for Ed Aulerich-Sugai, an artist whom Glück met in San Francisco in 1970 when both men were in their 20s. The narrative charts their life as a couple through the 1970s, as well as their friendship through the 1980s and early 1990s as the gay community faces the AIDS epidemic. "Life can't last forever but memory can," Glück writes. "Mourning occurs in the empty wasteland between the crowded past and the crowded present." The spine of the novel is the period between Ed's HIV diagnosis in 1987 and his death in 1994, with the stages of physical and mental decline observed by Glück in intensely elegiac prose. Based on 20 years of notes, including recorded conversations with Aulerich-Sugai and excerpts from his dream journals, Glück's novel is as philosophical and theory-leaning as one would expect from a writer of the New Narrative movement, while still offering carnivalesque carnality, piercing humor, keen social observation, and a humane, earthy sensibility. This is a revelation. (Nov.)

An autofiction elegy for both a former lover and the AIDS era. The Ed of the title is Ed Aulerich-Sugai, an acclaimed painter who died of AIDS in 1994. He and artist-essayist-poet Glück were lovers in the early '70s, though this book doesn't strictly chronicle their relationship, breakup, and friendship. Instead, Glück delivers lyric-essay chapters on his San Francisco neighbors as well as friends lost to AIDS through the '80s, bouncing between erotic remembrances of hookups to more mournful thoughts about Ed's death. Glück's tone can be wryly comic in remembering this era: "There were not enough orgasms in the universe to cut through the knot of tension that was Ed." Or it can be gently lyrical: "Burning isolation. From each red window Ed's outstreached arms. I'm safe in heaven, somehow." And there's a genuine tenderness in some moments, as when he recalls washing Ed's body with another lover after his death. But there's no prevailing order to this jumble of remembrances, which makes it hard to find a throughline in either Ed's personality or his relationship with Robert--and makes a scene of coprophilia even more blindsiding than it'd usually be. Much of the closing sections are dedicated to Ed's dream journals, which deploy a variety of metaphors around sex and illness, including shape-shifting, war, and Dennis Cooper-ish visions of incest and pedophilia. Glück's delivery here is abstract ("We run for our lives, dodging sunbeams filtered through a mesh of arching roses"), and anybody troubled by transgression is shopping in the wrong aisle. But it's as tedious to experience Ed's dreams at length as anybody's, and though Glück plainly strives to be affirming and loving, the prose is more often exhausting. A sui generis but wearying examination of grief. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.