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..

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..

Masterly.