To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

Some writers, faced with the prospect of an early death, respond, at least on the page, with a kind of grace, a generous, expansive clarity, colored, even purified, by the urgency of their awareness of the mortality we all share. In this novel/memoir (one of a half-dozen books he wrote in a frenzy after being diagnosed with AIDS—a death sentence at the time—in the late '80s), Guibert is neither gracious nor generous. He is, mostly and unrepentantly, a jerk. His book, though, crackles with life, with comedy as well as tragedy, with the swerves of a mind struggling to comprehend his predicament and to find the words to express it. His sentences are often cascades of indecision, of biting, gossipy asides, of awkward physical details, of anger and once in a while even affection. I don’t claim that his bitterness carries any more truth than the grace found by other writers, but neither would I say that it carries any less.