-The Arts Fuse
Robert Glück’s latest novel, About Ed, is a virtuosic amalgam of discursive ruminations — part AIDS memorial, part meditation. At the center of the work, the author recounts his relationship with the visual artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai. They were lovers in the ’70s and remained close friends until his death from AIDS in 1994.
Shifting perspectives and time frames interrupt the narrative throughout, a hodgepodge that includes Glück’s reminisces of the dead lover, childhood memories, portraits of elderly neighbors, dreamscapes, and travelogues. At first, this fragmented structure is confusing, but stick with it — About Ed delivers an immersive, emotionally rich experience.
The writer unabashedly celebrates sex, lots of sex. He also blurs various fictions and truths into a moving nonfiction/literary pastiche, incorporating into his melliferous prose text taken from taped recordings of his late friend as he slid into dementia and from the artist’s dream journals. Philosophical asides by the author abound, as well as his confessions of petty, unforgiven slights.
One chapter ingeniously details their ways of grappling with HIV status, a strategy inspired by the dead artist’s notes. Glück calls this book both “a novel and my version of an AIDS memoir.” As with other ‘new narrative’ queer writers, such as Dale Peck, Kevin Killian, Brad Gooch, and Kathy Acker, the storytelling approach is non-linear, intentionally self-conscious, and profoundly personal.
Two chapters, under the heading “Notes for a Novel,” provide a meta-view of the two decades of struggle it took for Glück to decide on the book’s final form. Elegiac and introspective, the completed manuscript turned out to be less about portraying the deceased than fending off intimations of mortality: “Do I write to remain in contact? — when I’m finished will he be truly buried?” The answer to those questions is that creating About Ed “turned into a ritual to prepare for death, and an obsession to put between death and myself.”