About Ed – Robert Glück

[New York Review Books; 2023]

Robert Glück writes to invoke “relation itself.” In his words, “to take part in a world that ceaselessly makes itself up.” To be sure, Glück’s is an experimental writing, as is the entirety of the work produced by the New Narrative movement, a community of queer, Bay Area writers to which he belonged. But unlike so many other avant-gardes that, in the pursuit of new forms, tended to abstract themselves from the political specificity of experience, this group of writers aimed for a kind of highly aestheticized grounding: form brought low by the inescapable muck of life. In this mode of narration, Glück attempts to answer the question he posed in his “Long Note on New Narrative,” what has come to be a kind of manifesto for the larger movement: “How can I convey urgent social meanings while opening or subverting the possibilities of meaning itself?” Glück wants a form of writing that imagines personality and subject-hood as fictions on par with the novel and myth, while remaining engaged with the materiality of these fictions in contemporary life. Fiction with toes in two waters: the abstract and the real.

About Ed, Glück’s most recent book, reanimates these considerations under the poignant lens of grief. At its core, this book is a portrait of its titular character, the visual artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai, who died of AIDS in 1994, and of Glück’s relationship with him, mostly post-diagnosis. From the first page, we receive Ed through the lens of this illness. Throughout the rest of the novel, we see glimpses of Ed and Glück when they were together, when they weren’t, scenes of jealousy and passion, recollections of early sexual experiences, essayistic anecdotes or digressions, moving inevitably toward death and, after, mourning—in short, an associative constellation that approximates this somewhat elusive titular personage. Ed.

But even those unfamiliar with the theoretical positions Glück gestures toward can see that this is no ordinary mode of biographical writing. Glück undermines, or perhaps complements it pretty much immediately. “Ed’s sick too”—the moment he is named he is placed within a community. Separated into three parts, the book begins by dealing in Ed tangentially. Entitled “Everyman,” it focuses as much on Mac, a friend of Glück’s who, too, died of AIDS; Mac’s partner, Nonie, who many years after Mac’s death died of cancer; and Denny, another of Glück’s partners. This opening section also contains much of the reflexive writing that defines the New Narrative style, a formal trick employed as a means of dramatizing “the dialectical cleft between real life and life as it wants to be” (Communal Nude, 94).

Nowhere in the novel is this “cleft” clearer than in its many ruminations on death—death as it exists within life. And this awareness, a refusal to see these two terms as dichotomous, provides About Ed with its formal engine: that of a Möbius Strip. On what we might call Ed’s side, death intrudes. “It’s Ed’s awareness of death in the midst of life,” Glück writes, “that aroused me and that made doctors recoil, negating them as it does.” On what we might call Glück’s side, life is now the disruptive force. Elaborating on the section’s title, he writes:

In the fifteenth-century play, Everyman pleads with Discretion, “Look into my grave once piteously.” Everyman wants to bring his death to life by giving it a biography, but Discretion rejects him. Everyman tries to place the image of his fate in Discretion’s mind to create a moment of promise.

This is, without a doubt, a reflexive passage; we can feel the author behind the book, pulling his many strings. So, too, is it abstract: The characters from this esoteric play are very literal archetypes. And yet, it is overflowing with pathos. Not only because we can draw clear lines from the archetypes to the living people (Everyman to Ed, Discretion to Glück), but because, in using these more abstract ideas, Glück reflects his genuine intent. About Ed, for all its formal intricacies, never comes across as an act of literary showmanship. Instead, it reorients a narrative genre that too often hinges upon the irreducibility of its subject to face outward, toward the social formations that shape us. Bruce Boone, one of the primary pillars of New Narrative, describes the dilemma of relational writing succinctly in his 1980 book, Century of Clouds: “The story is going to be impure; just like real, actual life is, in which these actual qualities exist and are found mixed in the social class and historical period of the audience [the writer is] addressing.” Ed’s position in About Ed is unstable. After all, his story is not his alone.

The middle section of the book, actually titled “About Ed” and by far the longest, has the feel of a biography, yet the biography begins with an image of Ed too ill to eat and ends long after he has died. What we’re really reading, what Glück, a far more generous Discretion, has actually written, is the biography of Ed’s death. For longtime readers of Glück, this insistence on destabilizing the biography form isn’t exactly new. In this ideal narrative mode, a writer like Glück can effectively challenge the idea of character, of identity. For one, biography adheres to the kind of accountability New Narrative writer Steve Abbott describes in his 1985 essay “Notes on Boundaries,” in which he argues that in using the names of loved one, “the writer/artist becomes exposed and vulnerable: [they] risk being foolish, mean-spirted, wrong.” But beyond that, the biography form allows Glück to fully explore one of New Narrative’s thorniest subjects: interiority.

New Narrative writers were, to put it mildly, ambivalent toward interiority. This ambivalence stems both from that movement’s poetic and philosophical influences and from the political realities of queer life in America. Working in San Francisco in the 70s and 80s, these writers were constantly confronted with competing realities. Language Poetry (a looming force in the Bay Area in the 70s) was trying to push the subject into the total, uninhibited abstraction of language, and across the country, famed critic Frederic Jameson was putting personality on the same fictional plane of existence as a novel. On the other hand, as Glück writes in Communal Nude, “[Queer folk] had been disastrously described by the mainstream—a naming whose most extreme (though not uncommon) expression was physical violence. Combatting this injustice,” he concludes, “required at least a provisionally stable identity.”

Biography becomes a compelling option: The subject must stand long and strongly enough to be visible within the form that gives it shape. Imagine, for example, reading a book called About Ed in which Ed is never named or even clearly identified. Yet the presumed stability of the subject invites play. The writer can toy with the fact that their reader is coming in expecting to gain an understanding of the person being written about, that they will be granted access to an interior (or private) life. Glück writes to, at the very least, complicate this assumption.

In his most pointed attempt at biographical writing, the 1994 novel Margery Kempe, Glück describes interior life as a kind of greed. There is something truly transgressive in this claim: that demarcating a space beyond the objective world’s scope is excessive. Margery Kempe denies the possibility of such a privilege. The novel retells the first-ever autobiography of the titular, fifteenth-century aspiring saint who (she would say literally) envisioned herself at Jesus’s birth and crucifixion. The novel “retells” this, but only under a certain guise: The narrator/Glück stand-in is using this story as a means of unpacking his relationship with a man named L. L forms a vector with Jesus, and so Glück with Kempe. Incredible complications follow. Not only does L take on the unapproachable grandeur of Jesus, Jesus takes on L’s expansive sensuality. We read, for instance, some vivid descriptions of Jesus getting his ass fingered. The ultimate symbol of the body’s abstraction into an ideal is thwarted, reconstituted not just in sex but in accounts of sex provided by Glück’s fellow New Narrative writers. In Margery Kempe, he explains how he “asked [his] friends for notes about their bodies to dress these fifteenth-century paper dolls.” To the point: What could be called the private life of Kempe (or Jesus) is externalized by its connection to Glück and his community, and vice versa.

When Glück writes to invoke “relation itself,” he does mean the relations between people, between bodies, but so, too, does he mean those between interiority and exteriority, subject and object, writer and reader. Perhaps the most poignant of the relations Glück writes to invoke is that between presence (flesh) and absence (language). This dynamic gives form not only to About Ed (flesh for life, language for death), but Margery Kempe as well. He writes:

How can the two halves of this novel ever be closed or complete? Or the book is a triptych: I follow L. on the left, Margery follows Jesus on the right, and in the center my fear hollows out “an empty space that I can fill.” (That’s how Ed describes his death.)

More than just a persistent referent, Ed acts as the albeit-concealed mortar holding together Glück’s fiction. Perhaps, then, About Ed is the hidden third in the triptych of Kempe, the empty space given the full extent of its form.

The book’s third, and final, section is that empty space in its crescendo. Composed entirely of Ed’s dream journal, it is Ed in his own words, Ed’s interiority in his own words. For what is more internal than a dream? A private self replicated within the mind’s public domains. It is a self within a self, an interiority the self cannot so easily access. Fittingly, this section is titled “Inside,” the second half of a dialectic started with Everyman’s public (universal) selfhood. We are meant to read this ironically. The shape of About Ed gestures toward the kinds of movements one sees in a Bildungsroman, or in the fiction of James Joyce: the movement from social conditions into a newly-consecrated, individual identity. In other words, characters become themselves. The irony here is twofold and obvious: one, selfhood has already been exposed as the collaborative fiction of a community; and two, Ed dies halfway through the book, Ed cannot “become” anything at all, least of all a self, or at least not a self in the way the dominant narrative mode suggests. If anything becomes anything, it is that absence or zero. Ed is a self in the way About Ed is a book: Both exist solely on the plane of language, all that remains now save Ed’s art and tomb. Reflecting on this, Glück writes: “Taking words into death can turn death into a comedy because language is reversible; language undermines death’s finality.” Can we then see About Ed as more than a simple means of remembrance? If a personality is truly on par with a novel, what implications does this have on the personality’s relationship to death?

These questions find an answer in one of the novel’s most powerful images. Shortly after Ed dies, Glück and his then-partner Daniel offer to clean his body. It is “something [he] can have from Ed’s death, something [he] can take away.” But, in the process, the Glück narrator/author experiences a vertigo of identification: In order to locate meaning in this act, he must first locate Ed’s existence. “If he exists alone in the air, as he might,” Glück writes, “would he still be Ed?” In place of such a metaphysical presence they are met with an image of shocking viscerally. “Daniel pulls down Ed’s underwear and milks one bright red drop from Ed’s cock.” This moment—Ed’s “murderous blood” erupting to the surface for a final, viscous bow—contains the post-mortem animacy the novel at large inhabits, another way to approximate the form of an erotic life without falling into a naive idealism. It is fitting that orgasm should have the final word, even more so with an ejaculation of the ultimate symbol, the substance of both Ed’s life and his death. This is what French theorist Georges Bataille (whose writings on the erotics of death and taboo greatly influenced New Narrative) means when he says:

The power to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity—that path is the secret of eroticism and eroticism alone can reveal it.

This book, too, like that drop of blood, lingers. With all the sensuality of embodied life, it is an afterimage with the texture of a dream. And if we enter it? Glück asks: What then? “Will his spirit manifest?” The dream is a kind of heaven. “Not a heaven that culminates in an image that explains a life,” Glück writes, “but a heaven of endless narration where image replaces image.” About Ed must then beg the crucial question: Just who, in the end, is entering whom?

Mark Mangelsdorf is a writer from Colorado with an MFA from UMass Amherst. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Romania, the 2019 Harvey Swados Fiction Prize, and the 2019 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Fiction. He currently lives in the greater Boston area.