Plays Well with Others

With great narrative inventiveness and emotional amplitude, Allan Gurganus gives us artistic Manhattan in the wild 1980s, where young artists--refugees from the middle class--hurl themselves into playful work and serious fun.Our guide is Hartley Mims Jr., a Southerner whose native knack for happiness might thwart his literary ambitions. Through his eyes we encounter the composer Robert Christian Gustafson, an Iowa preachers son whose good looks constitute both a mythic draw and a major limitation, and Angelina Alabama Byrnes, a failed deb, five feet tall but bristling with outsized talent.These friends shelter each other, promote each others work, and compete erotically.When tragedy strikes, this circle grows up fast, somehow finding, at the worst of times, the truest sort of family. Funny and heartbreaking, as eventful as Dickens and as atmospheric as one of Fitzgeralds parties, Plays Well with Others combines a fables high-noon energy with an elegys evening grace.Allan Gurganuss celebrated new novel is a lovesong to imperishable friendship, a hymn to a brilliant and now-vanished world.

Author: Allan Gurganus

Language: English

Edition: First edition.

Binding: Paperback

Pages: 368

Publisher: Vintage

Publication Date: 1999-02-02