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When the first volume of Larry Kramer’s epic “The American People” appeared in 2015, it contained not one epigraph at its front but 12. The one that mattered most was from Samuel Beckett’s “Malone Dies.” Beckett’s words might have served as an alternate title for this unbuttoned pair of novels: “Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody.”
Kramer is the playwright (“The Normal Heart”), novelist (“Faggots”) and screenwriter who became, during the first decade of the AIDS crisis in America, a full-throated activist. He was a controversialist, a horsefly on the body politic. He was a founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1981. Six years later he helped found the more assertive AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (Act Up). Its motto: “Silence = Death.”
Volume one of “The American People” was, if you’ll allow me to quote my original review, “a grand diva of a book, a wheezing jukebox of filthy jokes, political hit jobs, killing gossip, love songs and fluky mutterings.”
I also wrote that the novel wasn’t very good. It tripped over its own feet on nearly every other page. It was a memorable slab of chaos, for sure. It proposed that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Clemens (among many others) were gay. Lincoln starred in a sex scene in which, his lover reported, “my big bed took quite a beating.”
Kramer’s novel, for all its flop sweat and overkill, did do something important: It reminded us that non-heterosexual men and women have been with us forever, and it asked us to imagine and consider the lives they have led. It’s impossible to speak of the American people without also speaking of them.
His new novel, “The American People, Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact,” picks up where that first installment left off. We’re in postwar America now, and Fred Lemish, the author’s stand-in, is about to attend Yale. (In the novel, the university is called Yaddah.) A Hugh Hefner-like character named Mordy Masturbov is about to start a magazine called Sexopolis. In Washington, the spymasters J. Edgar Hoover and James Jesus Angleton are filing away details of their enemies’ sex habits.
“Show me a plague,” Kramer wrote in volume one, “and I’ll show you the world!” In this new novel — at 880 pages, it is even longer than the first — he lays the groundwork for the arrival of AIDS. When it does arrive, everyone, from politicians to health services to drug companies to insurance agencies to many others who might have been of use, behaves poorly. The national mood could have been boiled down to: Who cares if tens of thousands of [insert your preferred gay slur here] are dying painful, lonely deaths?
Volume two strews a lot of carnage. Kramer takes aim — sometimes by name, more often by satirical noms-de-plague — at many people and institutions he believes proved to be scoundrels.
This novel’s chief villain is probably Ronald Reagan, known here by the name Peter Ruester. Kramer has his revenge by depicting Ruester having sex with a character based on Edwin Meese, Reagan’s attorney general. Streams of contumely are directed at a newspaper (you are reading it) that Kramer calls The New York Truth for being slow off the mark in covering AIDS.
Lemish comments, in a scene set in the late 1980s: “I wonder: Where have been the voices of Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, George Steiner, Victor Navasky, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, William Styron, Elizabeth Hardwick, John Updike, Toni Morrison — to name only a few I used to admire but never heard from re: this most crucial issue now facing modern man.”
The score-settling is sometimes personal — although, with Kramer, everything is personal. A character named Adreena Schneeweiss (she will resemble, to some readers, Barbra Streisand) is pilloried for sitting on the film rights to Lemish’s play about the disease for many years. Not a few writers at The New Yorker (here called The New Gotham) come under fire.
A good deal of animus is directed at Yaddah (Yale), which seems in Lemish’s view to be at the beating heart of all things great and, more saliently, all things evil in American life. He assails the teaching of queer and gender theory there and elsewhere. What’s needed instead, he writes, is the teaching of gay history.
Lemish, like Kramer, is a diva, always ready to pull the bung from his emotions. He devours his enemies so ravenously that, when he speaks, their tails are still hanging from his mouth.
This novel carves out space for intimacy, for love stories. It swims, too, in loneliness. “Alone,” Kramer writes, “is the biggest group of people in history.”
It is obsessed with sexual organs; while many women are in it, it can seem, at times, to be a heroic poem on the theme of phallocentricity. Open it anywhere and you will find a sentence like this one: “George Washington had very large balls.” George W. Bush will not be amused at the character, a former cheerleader at Yaddah, who resembles him.
The humor is scabrous. One man is asked if he practices anal intercourse. His response: “Half of New York practices anal intercourse.” (This novel is anal as much as oral history.) Other times it is sly. “Jesus,” we are reminded, “was a single gentleman.”
A river of blood courses through Kramer’s epic. That blood is bought and sold and swapped and spilled. If both volumes of “The American People” were the only books left behind by our species, an alien people who discovered them would, at the very least, really know that we had been here.
“It is sex that creates, rules and ruins history,” Kramer writes. He also writes: “I believe that the acts that most radically alter the course of history are evil deeds perpetrated on others intentionally, and that these perpetrators and these deeds force history to become what it should be recorded as: a narrative of evil deeds.” By this novel’s end, Dereck Dumster (Donald Trump) is on the horizon.
This novel, like its predecessor, is overstuffed, packed with incident and narrators and digressions within digressions. Unlike an iceberg, it hides nothing under the surface. It’s a mess, a folly covered in mirrored tiles, but somehow it’s a beautiful and humane one. It’s the journal of a plague century. I can’t say I liked it. Yet, on a certain level, I loved it.
Kramer is 84 and, according to some reports, in failing health. It’s almost impossible to imagine him exiting this earth, for the same reason that Mickey Sabbath couldn’t in Roth’s novel “Sabbath’s Theater”: “Everything he hated was here.”
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