Every once in a while, we come across a work that announces itself as a labor of love, whose author has spent years wrestling with the subject before finding the voice s/he sought. When the subject is AIDS, there is the added difficulty of adequately describing the physical, intellectual and emotional inroads the disease can make on not only the person who is ill but on those around him/her. These are books that beg our indulgence on multiple levels, especially if the form itself is new to the author. Songs For the New Depression is such a work.

Inspired by the death of a former lover, Mr. Edwards-Stout has crafted a memento mori based on his partner's struggle for an authentic life as that life drew to a close. Bracketed by the protagonist's reflections on finality, the book works to peel back the layers of his life, beginning at the end and moving in stages to his adolescence, more or less a decade at a time, revealing his internal conflicts like the leaves of an onion.

We see the main character first in his final year, working at an AIDS non-profit, juggling fund-raising considerations, volunteer training and assignments, events planning, and the demands of a new and hopeful relationship. As the book regresses, we see the conflicts of his outward personality and inner desires, tempered by an impulsive nature that seems to require him to make hasty, unwise decisions and alienate friends and acquaintances alike. At the core are his earliest love and his struggle to connect at a deep level, frustrated by an equally powerful urge for brilliant celebrity and the empty trappings of success.

Gabe, the central character, is hampered by his sense that he is both superior to and constricted by his surroundings and the people who love him. His internal conflict is broadly drawn, and the effective reach of his defensive temper is clear from the outset. The novel avoids omniscience and moves straightforwardly in first-person narrative, as Gabe works to reach some level of peace with himself.

There are flashes of humor as he describes scenes and people, often with an accuracy that belies his self-involvement but stamps him as an accomplished warrior in the world of gay social interaction. In the end, we are left with the disquieting sense that he has left nearly everything he wanted to say unsaid, and those he would have wished to comfort, uncomforted. This is a sad legacy for a character whom we would have liked to like, given the genesis of the book.

For those of us who have had the unhappy experience of living through the worst of the AIDS epidemic much of this tale will seem familiar. Readers under thirty, however, more accustomed to think of AIDS as a manageable chronic infection, will find the details of the central character's choices and decline instructive.

Circumspect Press is a new publisher, established to support the writing of Mr. Edwards-Stout and a select group of other writers. That roster will no doubt be enlightening as more works are brought out.

Songs For the New Depression, by Kergan Edwards-Stout

251 pp., Circumspect Press, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-9839837-1-2 (hc) $23.99

ISBN: 978-0-9839837-0-5 (pbk) $15.99/Barnes & Noble

ISBN: 978-0-9839837-2-9 (ebk – all formats) $9.99

 

 

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We see the main character first in his final year, working at an AIDS non-profit, juggling fund-raising considerations, volunteer training and assignments, events planning, and the demands of a new and hopeful relationship. 

At the core are his earliest love and his struggle to connect at a deep level, frustrated by an equally powerful urge for brilliant celebrity and the empty trappings of success.