- Paperback: 317 pages
- Publisher: Harcourt (Aug 1993)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0151864268
- ISBN-13: 978-0151864263
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 13.5 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,111,696 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
An account of three men - Jasper, Dominick and the narrator, Timothy - who are dying of AIDS. The story is an elegy to love and to a lost generation of men. It is also a celebration of a lost way of life.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This novel focuses on what it is to be gay with an AIDS background. The narrator Timothy reminicences on his relationship with Jasper, a much older lover, over a dinner with his best friend Dominic. There is scarcely a page where being gay is not part of the narration but this is not an erotic New York gay encounter but a moving and very poignant account of a far from perfect relationship over a period of 18 years. Coe's semi-autobiographical account is slowly revealed and while the style sometimes left me on the sidelines this novel I am sure would have received more accolades had the author not died so soon after publication. AIDS novels were at their peak at this time but if you want to read one this account would be in the top drawer.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This story is so deeply sad. The story of the 3 friends living together and the tragedies that occur is told with such honesty that it will tear you apart. The last chapter really tugs at your heartstrings, believe me. This is a book about gay life in a class of its own and one that is impossible not to fall in love with.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
11 reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
As "Frivolous" as Proust
3 Nov 1999
Format:Paperback
Never having read a review of my favorite gay novel (and one of the few worth even a mention in literary terms), I was surprised by how misunderstood it has been. "Brittle", "cloying", and "tone-deaf"? What novel did Kirkus Reviews read? Coe is the most eloquent and sophisticated of gay writers, and reminded me more of Proust than of other contemporary gay novels (of the "Will Bob succeed in picking up the buff gym boy or will his heart be broken forever" ilk, or, worse still, the "poignant, funny, uplifting coming out story volume 412").
Structurally, the novel is breathtaking, juggling its leaps in time so brilliantly that the result is a sort of dialogue between past and present, even between old selves and new. Not only do revelations from the past echo in the present, but the present reverberates in the past. This novel shows us modern gay writing as it has never been before and (so far) has not been again, and as such, it's sad but hardly surprising that it's been misunderstood. Calling Timothy "frivolous" is roughly equal in obviousness to calling Captain Ahab "obsessive" or Sylvia Plath "self-absorbed", and it in no way subtracts from the power and the pain of seeing him forced by life and death to lose his innocence and mature into something more. Frivolous or not, he's a character most of us have known and fallen for in life--someone who turns up the volume and makes even the most mundane elements of life seem crucial and real.
Coe's previous novel, "I Look Divine", was a small masterpiece, but "Such Times" is a full-blown classic--sensual and lovely, sad, funny, bitter, and profound, difficult but immensely gratifying. If gay literature is ever to be about more than cruising and coming to terms with who we want to make whoopee with, we should greet writers like Christopher Coe with much joy, hope, and, of course, frivolousness.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
An eccentric but beautiful book
28 Jan 1999
Format:Paperback
First, let me correct Kirkus's factual errors: Timothy and Dominic have been friends only since their college days at Berkeley in the early 1970s; except for Dominic, whose has family money, all of the characters work (Timothy is a portrait photographer, Jasper owns an import company, Abigail is a medical writer, etc.); and the novel contains just one, rather brief, explicit sex scene, in a side street in Paris. Also, when the book opens, Jasper has been dead for some time.
As Timothy remembers his 18 years with Jasper, during a long evening with Dominic in LA, the reader discovers a beautiful, accurate portrait of gay relationships during the 1970s and the early plague years (though not once does the word gay appear). Some scenes are unbearably moving, as when Timothy and Jasper sit on a stone jetty in Provincetown looking at the night sky, and Timothy realizes that life has, at certain moments, given him nearly all he has dared to hope for. AIDS appears as an almost metaphorical presence, less an unspeakable tragedy than an interloper that forces Timothy to assess the exact nature of his life with Jasper. The reader sees the unequal love between these two men as the focus of the book, so their eventual illness conveys pathos rather than the usual cloying self-pity.
I recommend this novel to anyone who wonders about that unique time between the paranoid post-war years and this era of discourse about marriage, polyamory, monogamy, adoption, ghettoes, guppies, circuits, dysfunctional families, barebacking, substance abuse, body fascism, etc., etc. (An aside: Coe has about as much in common with Gary Indiana--an excellent writer with a surreal, blackly comic vision--as, say, Agatha Christie with Andrew Vachss; not much.)
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
These Times
4 Jun 2000
Format:Paperback
This work is intense and intimate -- a stream of consciousness without the need for apology in its details. Coe's interplay of the seemingly trivial elements of life with the final, ultimately singular experience of death is handled with a poignant reserve. Each character, every element, invites the reader to observe the maturity of the human spirit over a period of years. Love is the central, timeless focal point: from the self-adoring youthfulness with which Timothy begins, through the bittersweet longing with which he lets go. Every person with whom I've shared this marvelous story needed only to read the first paragraph before realizing there was no turning back. It is a book for all times.
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