The result interweaves elements of biography, memoir, psychotherapy, philosophy and confession. Glück’s long struggle to write this book remains palpable in its fragmented structure ... Glück writes through digression, in conversation with the inevitable and the unknown at once. This is a stylistic choice, but also a method of opening up the text: Each paragraph becomes a living, growing thing, pushing in all direction.
The book’s subject is not only Ed but also his generation of gay men, many of whom lost their lives to aids. In Glück’s hands, memorializing becomes a defiant celebration of sex. Few writers have approached this task with his shameless feeling—Glück is one of the best around at portraying the mysteries of the flesh, and in About Ed, as in his previous novels, his amatory writing is magnificently precise ... The New Narrative encourages active self-questioning on the page, and Glück operates beautifully in this tradition, reconsidering and amending his recollections from the vantage of age. About Ed revisits the past through moments that he can neither forget nor firmly grasp ... A successful memorial in part because it is a promiscuous one.
The narrative stops and starts and digresses like relationships do ... The novel’s form is not confined to the shape of the page or its syntax; Glück augments a particular kind of shape to his writing—has a spatial dimension that is fleshy and dense, brittle and easily bruised, but one that can also be emptied or hollowed right out.
Glück elaborates a particular and surprising structure of feeling: abundance where one might have expected absence. Meditating on Ed’s death and life, Glück makes death abundant in his own thoughts and actions, and works grief richly into his sentence.
It’s as tedious to experience Ed’s dreams at length as anybody’s, and though Glück plainly strives to be affirming and loving, the prose is more often exhausting. A sui generis but wearying examination of grief.
Masterly ... Glück’s novel is as philosophical and theory-leaning as one would expect from a writer of the New Narrative movement, while still offering carnivalesque carnality, piercing humor, keen social observation, and a humane, earthy sensibility. This is a revelation.
