Book Review: Christopher Coe's Such Times

By Lyle Chan

This book had languished unread on my bookshelf since 1993. Back then I bought a
lot of AIDS novels, more from a sense of duty than a desire to consume the
writing. I continued reading them long after I was numb to the genre, but I never
got around to Such Times.

Today, in developed countries anyway, AIDS is a “chronic, manageable illness”.

Back in the early 1990s, this is precisely what we would have settled for (what
we'd hoped for was an outright cure). For all its criminal sluggishness at the
beginning of the epidemic, the medical community's accomplishment in a mere decade
is astonishing. Clinical and pharmaceutical researchers were goaded into action by
a patient community whose savvy shattered the paternal paradigm of doctor-knows-
best.
The result is this amazing truth: the desperate phase of the epidemic is over.

Many didn't think such a day would come. In the white-hotness of those years when
this backdrop of death seemed never to relent, thousands of AIDS novels, short
stories, plays and poems were written.

What do they read like today? Inevitably, like fiction of a bygone era. Not
historical fiction like Eco or McCullough, but like Kerouac or Austen or Flaubert,
writers who depicted their own time that we still read today.

It turns out Such Times is one of the books from the high epidemic still read
today. As with any genre, time calls out the classics. The works of Paul Monette
and Tony Kushner seem to endure, as does Larry Kramer's, which really need an
edition with footnotes to be read today,. What was the first AIDS novel? Probably
Paul Reed's Facing It (1984). And the last? A tie between Allan Gurganus' Plays
Well With Others (1999) and Michael Cunningham's The Hours (2000), both clearly
post-epidemic novels in that AIDS does not take centrestage.

There is little remarkable about what happens to the characters in Such Times, but
that's why it's realistic. It's a story about the compromises you make when you're
in love. Timothy loves Jasper who is twenty years older. Jasper loves Timothy back
but does not believe in monogamy. While Jasper finds sex in New York's piers or
bathhouses, Timothy doesn't stray – until years later in Paris when he seeks out
Claude and has a brief affair, for the sole purpose of not being able to point the
finger at Jasper if he were to be infected with HIV. Both Jasper and Timothy get
sick. By the book's end, Jasper has died and we know, this being 1993, that
Timothy will die too. Their relationship lasted 18 years.

The story is told as a nested series of recollections that come to Timothy as he

meets a friend, Dominic, to go out to dinner. The flashback approach is deft, not
least because Coe mixes it with a subtle flashforward technique; he provides
quizzical moments which you quickly learn are prolepses to be decoded later, and
you enjoy the anticipation. Near the start of the novel, Timothy expresses
disappointment that Dominic has ordered seafood risotto for two. Some 80 pages
later we find out that Jasper used to cook scallops, and Timothy removes them from
the risotto like someone refusing to deal with a painful memory.

Food is a recurring motif, and the plentiful descriptions of elaborate meals and
wine seem gratuitous until we see, in the final chapter – the final time Timothy
sees Jasper – Jasper too sick to swallow food and hadn't eaten anything solid for
6 weeks.

The moral of Such Times is that even in a relationship where both are in love, at
some point you discover who loves more. Coe's writing, as open and truthful as it
is, has a detachment because it is so spare and clean. This is Timothy discovering
Jasper's failed suicide: “The thought I did have was that this man, whom I loved
more than anyone alive, had not thought of me when he tried to take his life. He
knew I had the virus and was willing to leave me with it. He was what I lived for,
and he had been eager to take himself away and leave me without him.”

Coe has a sharp ear for for dialog and the fatuous things needed to accurately
depict New York gay life at the turn of the 1990s: “I could count on one hand the
number of blowjobs I've given. Of course, I would have needed to use the one hand
more than once – six, seven, eight: you can count infinity on one hand.”

But his wry observations of symbolic loss are what make you pause: “Someone wrote,
I think long ago, that a chair by itself in a room will look quite lonely. To
prove this, a photographer took a black-and-white picture of a chair in an empty
room. It was all by itself. [...] a chair needs someone sitting in it and has no
other utility. Even an empty bed can be made to look inviting; you can plump up
pillows; you can turn a bed down. There isn't much you can do with a chair. A
chair just haunts a room.”

Coe himself died of AIDS at the age of 41 in 1994. This novel is strongly
autobiographical. His character Timothy is born in 1954 like him, and also had an
older lover with whom he bought an apartment in Paris. Coe and Timothy both didn't
have health insurance and were financially ruined by having AIDS.

Such Times can still be read today because its enduring qualities – the distilled
writing, the emphasis on truth in love, the ability to keep us interested in
characters who are nothing like ourselves – are independent of it being an AIDS
novel. If today we can still read fiction about a long-past war like Remarque's
All Quiet on the Western Front or Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, we can also
read Coe's “the uncrested waves of death” when AIDS was war.

As I write this, there is a German news report that a bone marrow transplant from
a person with natural HIV resistance has resulted in the recipient having
undetectable HIV levels for 20 months and counting. Progress continues.