Cover

ACCLAIM FOR Allan Gurganus’s
Plays Well with Others

“Captures the pulse and beat of an era and a world. Will remind the reader of F. Scott Fitzgerald on New York…. [The] narrator wants to write a book that will memorialize his friends’ short lives … something Gurganus himself has achieved in this vexing and powerful novel.”

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“A supremely affecting tale.”

—Chicago Tribune

“With Southern aplomb that recalls literary forebears O’Connor and Faulkner, Gurganus makes his readers chuckle about the grimmest of circumstances.”

—Time Out

“Gurganus succeeds in capturing a vanished place and time with poignancy … compassion and wit.”

—Boston Book Review

“Gurganus is the worthy heir to Faulkner and Welty.”

—USA Today

“A novel that laughs through the pain. Nothing about Plays Well with Others is coy, demure or otherwise closeted. [Gurganus] grounds catastrophe with humor.”

—Time

“Gurganus writes without a safety net…. [He] can do anything he likes as a writer.”

—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Nation

Title Page

Dedication

For TOBIAS SCHNEEBAUM
and JOE CALDWELL,

friends, artists, and two beloved
heroes of our recent siege

It pleases me to thank my friends, this book’s earliest readers. I am grateful to Mona Simpson, Helen Miranda Wilson, Joanne Meschery, Jane Holding, John Shoneman, Andrea Simon, Danny Kaiser, Tim Woodman, Chris Bram, Erica Eisdorfer, Charles Millard, Michael Pollan, Judith Belzer, George Eatman, David Vintinner, and Daisy Thorp. To my agent and compeer, Amanda Urban, warmest daily gratitude.

I am devoted to my editor, Dan Frank, for his intelligence, serenity, and character. For being there at the creation, for patience and imagination, a godfather’s full rights.

Thank you, friends.

During the terrible years of Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in the prison queues of Leningrad. One day someone recognized me. Then a woman with lips blue from cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear (we spoke in whispers there):

“Can you describe this?”

I said, “I can!”

Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.

—ANNA AKHMATOVA, “Requiem”

PROLOGUE
The Comedy of Friends

Thirty Dildoes

I.

here are just two kinds of people in the world: those who will help you and those who won’t.

In New York, New York, 1983, we—being this talented and so young—found but one roadblock to our careers.

It was called getting sick.

I myself seem able to help my friends. Know what?—I often hate it.

Nothing roused him from the sweet ice of his final coma. Nothing till we mentioned his parents’ flying in today from Iowa. They’d arrive bearing baked goods and one greeting card signed by their entire Lutheran church—they would stay at our patient’s very own apartment.