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Maybe someday
43
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
19/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Robert Glück
Publisher:
New York Review Books
Date:
November 14, 2023
Bob Glück met Ed Aulerich-Sugai in 1970. Ed was an aspiring artist; Bob wanted to write. They were young men in San Francisco at the high tide of sexual liberation and soon, and for eight years, they were lovers, after which they were friends. Ed was an explorer in the realms of sex. He was beautiful, fragile, exasperating, serious, unassuaged. In 1994 he died of HIV. His dream notebooks became a touchstone for this book, which Glück has been working on for some two decades, while also making his name as a proponent of New Narrative writing and as one of America's most unusual, venturesome, and lyrical authors. About Ed is about Ed, who remains, as our dead do, both familiar and unknowable, faraway and close. It is about Bob too.
What The Reviewers Say
The result interweaves elements of biography, memoir, psychotherapy, philosophy and confession. Glück’s long struggle to write this book remains palpable in its fragmented structure.
The book’s subject is not only Ed but also his generation of gay men, many of whom lost their lives to aids. In Glück’s hands, memorializing becomes a defiant celebration of sex. Few writers have approached this task with his shameless feeling—Glück is one of the best around at portraying the mysteries of the flesh, and in About Ed, as in his previous novels, his amatory writing is magnificently precise.
The narrative stops and starts and digresses like relationships do.
Glück elaborates a particular and surprising structure of feeling: abundance where one might have expected absence. Meditating on Ed’s death and life, Glück makes death abundant in his own thoughts and actions, and works grief richly into his sentence..
