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.)