Plays Well with Others (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Gurganus, Allan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375702032 ISBN 13: 9780375702037

Publisher: Vintage, 1999

Synopsis

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In his widely read, prize -- winning "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 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 theyreally 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'v 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.

About this title

Product Description:

[ Plays Well with Others Vintage Contemporaries By ( Author ) Feb-1999 Paperback

Review:

"A wondrous book..brimming with life.... [It] confirms Gurganus's stature as one of our most significant and indispensable writers." --Atlanta Journal & Constitution

"Gurganus, a storyteller in the grand tradition, can tell his stories as well as anyone alive." --The New York Times

"Witty and piercing. There are sentences that glisten like black opals." --Los Angeles Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0375702032
• ISBN 13: 9780375702037
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368