With help from Satan and the saints, mansorts through AIDS losses
The 1980s and early ’90s may as well be a millennium ago for many people, so it’s understandable that some may not fully appreciate the devastation that AIDS wrought in the United States. Celebrities sported red grosgrain lapel ribbons to raise awareness of AIDS, but, more lastingly, works such as Randy Shilts’s book “And the Band Played On” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” chronicled the effect of the disease and the government indifference that allowed it to spread. They are useful references for people who either don’t know about America’s AIDS epidemic or have put it out of memory.
Jacob, the 50-ish Yemeni poet who is the protagonist of Rabih Alameddine’s fine new novel, “The Angel of History,” remembers all too well. Over six months in the ’90s, Jacob, a San Francisco resident, lost his pediatrician lover, Doc, and five other friends to the disease. “AIDS was a river with no bed,” he says, “that ran soundlessly and inexorably through my life, flooded everything, drowned all I knew.”
Twenty years later, the river is still raging. The impact of those losses lingers to such an extent that he talks to imaginary people and, as he did during the height of the epidemic, has begun hearing Satan’s voice in his head, so he checks himself into a psychiatric clinic in an attempt to cope with the resurgence of his trauma.
“The Angel of History” goes back and forth in time and among different characters and styles to create a portrait of Jacob’s life. How’s this for a framing device: Satan sets up in Jacob’s apartment to help him recall moments from his past, “to harrow the soil and dislodge the silt,” and rescue him from his crisis. Satan conducts interviews with Death, sartorially resplendent in Versace and black cashmere (“I’m no low-rent Lucifer”), along with the Fourteen Holy Helpers, the Roman Catholic saints who are among the chorus of voices Jacob often hears.
Alameddine intercuts these interviews with scenes from the visit to the clinic and excerpts from Jacob’s journals. In these diaries, Jacob revisits people and events of his life, beginning with his unwed mother, a “short maid from the deserts of Yemen.” Mixed among Jacob’s diatribes against such recent events as a drone strike in Yemen and Middle Eastern children dying from sarin gas are tales of his mother’s years working as a prostitute in a Sana’a whorehouse and their subsequent relocation to Cairo, where Badeea, one of the “aunties” who serviced gentlemen customers, looked after Jacob whenever she wasn’t entertaining male patrons.
Most powerful are the scenes of Jacob during the height of the epidemic. It takes 17 minutes for Jacob to pry Doc’s fingers off the bedrail after Doc dies. In his final days, a friend named Greg can’t stop shaking from a form of chorea. When Doc is too weak to move without Jacob’s help, he cuts his foot on the floor, leaving a stain the shape of a kerosene lamp in the wood, a stain Jacob wanted to preserve as a reminder.
These enduring traumas have crippled Jacob to the point that he can no longer write poetry. He turns to short fiction in the hope of regaining his creative spark. The novel’s most wildly imaginative moments are in the sample stories included here. One is told from the point of view of an American drone that falls in love with a boy named Mohammad. And, in a sardonically hilarious entry, a husband and wife attend a party at his boss’ opulent house, where they meet the boss’ pet Arab. When the couple asks the reason the boss owns an Arab, he explains, “I’m allergic to cats.”
Grim scenes of life in the AIDS era interspersed with rollicking comedy: That’s the experience that awaits readers of “The Angel of History.” Anyone who has read “An Unnecessary Woman” knows that Alameddine’s is a poetically flippant prose style. As you can tell from the passages included here, he hasn’t abandoned it. For some readers, however, that may be disconcerting: bitchy repartee among spirits and saints one minute, gut-wrenching scenes of death and illness the next. “Linearity can be boring,” St. Eustace says. Alameddine would no doubt agree, but, in this case, the shifts in tone can sometimes be discordant.
But that’s the price you have to pay with an author as ingenious as Alameddine. Despite its unevenness, “The Angel of History” is a richly textured novel that is a remarkable feat of imagination and a cry to remember a condition that not only still affects much of America but continues to overwhelm countries in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. The lapel ribbons may be gone, but the pain remains. Michael Magras is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. His work has appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Miami Herald.