Grief

Old Book of the Week by Andrew Holleran Thomas Wolfe once divided novelists into "putter-inners" (like himself) and "taker-outers," who pared their art down to its bones. This is one of the taker-outerest novels I've ever read. There's so much you don't know about in this elegant, reticent story, despite its setting in the concrete details of Northwest Washington, DC, in the late Clinton era. The great unspoken is the recent plague, the devastation of AIDS, of which the narrator and his friends are survivors. Those years are not entirely suppressed, but they are spoken of with the shared exhaustion of those who have lived through a tragedy together and are still trying to live. Grief, for that lost generation, and for other losses, surrounds the story with a white, silent space that gives this spare story its gravity.