Vital Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction
Edited by Richard Canning
Carroll & Graf. 352 pages, $15.95
WHEN DID WE STOP thinking about AIDS? Was it when the combination drug therapies started to keep people alive? Or when the epidemic shifted to the third world with a magnitude difficult to grasp in any personal way? Or when we became engaged in other battles, for gay marriage, against global warming? The AIDS epidemic in America, first mentioned in the New York Times in July 1981, is now part of history. In this book, Richard Canning, who teaches courses about AIDS literature to college students, has assembled eighteen short stories, written at what he calls “the epidemic’s darkest time of unknowing,” the early 1980’s through 1998. What is startling about these stories, especially for readers who lived through that era, is not how distant but instead how familiar they seem.
The physician and writer Abraham Verghese, who has a story in Vital Signs, has commented that “AIDS is life,” by which he means we all live with a death sentence and struggle as best we can to understand the meaning of our lives in the time we have before us. Those of us granted the perspective of twenty years can now look back on the experiences described in these stories—love, suffering, loss, survival—and see that they are eventually the fate of everyone. The difference, of course, is time. We have had decades to absorb life’s blows. The young men and women in these stories had only a few years. This foreshortening of life is what gives the best of these stories their power and their almost unbearable sadness.Canning explains in his introduction that his selection includes only American short stories written in the years before medical treatment began to prolong survival, because that is when the most notable body of AIDS fiction was produced. It seems odd to praise stories about something so awful, stories so hard to read. For the most part, they are about young people facing death, with their only support coming from friends just as young and baffled as they. The plots are predetermined, nothing stops the “irreversible decline,” so the narratives often go backward as characters tell each other stories from a happy, hopeful past. Visits from ghosts are common. Real people appear in the stories, celebrities like Rock Hudson and Roy Cohn, because they were the first to make AIDS real for the American public, and politicians like Ronald Reagan, because they did so little to help. And some of the stories are astonishingly funny, displaying humor that almost overcomes the terrible circumstances.
The first two stories are by Andrew Holleran and Edmund White, already accomplished writers when the virus surfaced. These two authors are without equal in portraying gay life in New York in the 1970’s. Reading them, we wonder, did people that beautiful, that witty, that successful truly exist? Did they have that much sex, take that many drugs? Even in the midst of AIDS, Holleran’s and White’s characters cannot ignore the splendors of the world: brilliant conversation, a rented palace in Crete, a beautiful man. What now seems most notable about these stories is their ability to achieve moral clarity without being judgmental. In 1990 Alan Barnett had just begun his career by publishing an acclaimed collection of short stories. One,“Philostorgy, Now Obscure,” is a heartbreaking account of friends just out of college, one of whom, Preston, will not live to fulfill the promise of his youth. The backward glance in the story includes letters the friends exchanged while students. We see Preston as he will remain forever: educated, intelligent, but without the understanding that only time teaches. HIV-positive when he wrote the stories, Barnett would not live to publish a second book.
The majority of stories in Vital Signs are about well-off gay white men living in New York, because this was the world so many of the gay writers of the era came to know. An anthology of “essential” fiction will, appropriately, be judged by what’s included and what’s left out. Within the time frame he has set himself, Canning does show the wider impact of AIDS. In “Lilacs,” Abraham Verghese, who worked with AIDS patients in Tennessee, gives voice to Bobby, a young man from poor beginnings in South Carolina seeking medical care and control over his life in a Boston hospital. Rebecca Brown’s “A Good Man” is an overly long but moving story of a lesbian in Seattle caring for Jim, a friend who doesn’t want to die. Thomas Glave’s “The Final Inning,” a prize-winning 1997 story, will be a revelation for those who don’t know his work. Set in the aftermath of the funeral of a young black man who died of AIDS and written in long, encompassing sentences reminiscent of Faulkner, the story reveals the failure of the African-American community and churches to address AIDS and the plight of a decent man unable to face the potentially terrifying consequences of his sexual behavior for his wife and son.
The stories in Vital Signs are presented chronologically. There’s a shift in the second half of the book away from the anguished astonishment of the mid-1980’s to the mood of accommodation of the 1990’s. In Adam Klein’s “Keloid,” from 1995, AIDS has become institutionalized, providing work for a successful researcher who picks up a young man during a medical meeting in San Francisco. The later stories are also more experimental in technique. Dale Peck’s “Thirteen Ecstasies of the Soul” is a poetic meditation on the transience of life, hauntingly conveyed in these words: “children leave their parents this way, and lovers leave each other, and the soul will leave the body like this, like a drop of water making its way back to the ocean, slowly joining and rejoining and joining yet again, until what was whole once becomes, once again, whole.”
Many of the stories in Vital Signs are splendidly written. That is one reason to read the book. The stories are also a chronicle of our time, the deeply felt record of what happened written by those who witnessed and, in some cases, succumbed to the epidemic. In the end, Vital Signs is overwhelmingly a book about loss: loss of daily pleasures, loss of promise, loss of friends, of lovers, of life at a young age. It would be a mistake to diminish this by applying an uplifting coda to these stories. It is enough to say that we recognize ourselves and the tragically shortened trajectory of life in them.
Daniel Burr is an assistant dean at the Univ. of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he also teaches courses on literature and medicine.
