What I Did Wrong
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
What I Did Wrong is a dazzling return to fiction for John Weir, a romance that embraces its objects—from the endlessly bewildering question of what it means to be a man to the aspect of New York in all its manic and heartbreaking grandeur. It is a powerfully moving—and often disarmingly funny—book about loss, character, and sexuality in the post-AIDS era, a survivor’s tale in an age when all the certainties have lost their logic and force.
Tom, a forty-two-year-old English professor, watched his best friend, Zack, die a terrible, raging death, and finds himself haunted by it as he himself slouches gingerly and precariously into middle age, questioning every certainty he had about his identity as a gay man. That “gender trouble” is played out on the field of his college classes, populated with testosterone-fortified street-wise guys from Queens whose cocky bravado can’t quite compensate for their own confused masculinity. Hardly immune to the occasional unnervingly romantic jolt from his students, Tom tries to balance his awkwardly developing friendships with them. In the process, he begins to find common ground with these proud young men and, surprisingly, a way to claim his own place in the world, and in history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sixteen years after The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, Weir checks in with a follow-up that sparkles episodically but lacks the narrative drive of its celebrated predecessor. Fortyish novelist and Queens College professor Tom, who survived his 20s and 30s in a New York ravaged by AIDS, encounters a lifetime of demons during one jam-packed day in May 2000. Tom's straight boyhood friend Richie McShane, thinking he may be out of his depth on an Internet-arranged date with a person named Afrodytea, is bringing Tom along to chaperone. As the two navigate the five boroughs, Tom takes stock, pondering the wisdom of falling for his student Justin Innocenzio (a thuggish yet sensitive straight boy from Queens), and rehashing his first two love affairs (with suave older man Mark and street-smart girl Ava) and his early days with Richie. Most of all, though, Tom is haunted by friends lost to AIDS, particularly by the specter of Zack, a noisome, repellent activist from ACT UP days (possibly based on the late novelist David B. Feinberg, author of Eighty-Sixed). Though Weir's prose has humor and grace to spare, a clich ghost adviser and intrusions of lousy student poetry aren't camp enough, and an overly complicated narrative structure creates confusion.
