Fiction, Fiction Subjects

Dancing on the Moon

Name: Dancing on the Moon
Author: Jameson Currier
ISBN: 9780140172720

by Jameson Currier

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Overview

In the title story from Dancing on the Moon a young man, thinking of all his friends who have died from AIDS and those who are ill, says: "No one out there has a clue as to what our lives are like. All this is as strange to them as dancing on the moon." The speaker marveling at the gulf that separates those affected by AIDS from a world that thinks itself immune is just one of the memorable characters in this unprecedented book of twelve virtuoso stories about the impact of AIDS, particularly as it has reverberated through the lives of gay men. With profound literary courage, Jameson Currier documents what those lives are like. With sure-handed narrative skill, Chekhovian compassion, and remarkable grace, Currier writes not only about those who are living with AIDS and those who have died from it but also about the friends, families, and lovers who nurse and care for the sick and remember them afterward. His characters range from rebellious Southern teenagers to an elderly Jewish woman whose grandson has died, to an infant with AIDS adopted by an AIDS widower and his new lover. "What They Carried" concerns the things friends bring and give to another friend over the course of his struggle with the disease. "Reunions" finds two men sharing a bizarre cab ride in the last days of their illnesses. In "The Absolute Worst" a woman reunites two former lovers from her college years. A woman submerges herself in the new life of her dead brother's lover in order to come to terms with her own losses in "Weekends." In "Ghosts" a man seeks out a dying acquaintance in an unconscious attempt to justify his own lover's suicide. In all the stories men and women search for order and reason during a health crisis that knows no rationale. With both humor and pathos, tragedy and hope, Jameson Currier writes about life as it is lived today. Without being maudlin, sentimental, or hysterical, he shows that even the horror of AIDS can be meaningful, poignant, and instructive to the hum

With profound literary courage, Chekhovian compassion, and humor, Currier writes not only about those who are living with AIDS and those who have died from it, but also about the friends, families, and lovers who nurse and care for the sick and remember them afterward.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This collection's subtitle may strike readers as somewhat misleading: instead of dealing with the broad spectrum of people with AIDS, Currier focuses almost exclusively on the disease's impact on the gay community. The minutiae of one patient's decline are relentlessly though movingly chronicled in ``What They Carried''; a mother's histrionic hypochondria sadly separates two lovers in the plaintive ``Montebello View.'' Throughout, a miasma of grief generally weighs more heavily and more affectingly than dialogue or description, as keenly exemplified when two friends--one healthy, one sick--try on ``Winter Coats.'' A few of the 12 stories lack a distinctive voice, their intensity mounting instead into a kind of lament (effective, if perhaps not the most cogent use of the short-story genre). Most of Currier's writing is palpably poignant, although intermittently he succumbs to cliches of plot or characterization--e.g., ``I never thought I would reach a point in my life where I felt like I was drowning--floundering and fumbling without any sense of direction.'' And the emotions he depicts can be elusive, seemingly just out of our grasp or perception. Perhaps the most pervasive sentiment here is uttered by one of the southern teenagers in ``Civil Disobedience'': ``People are dyin' and nobody is doin' anythin'.'' (Mar.)