WAITING ON A FRIEND

A young lesbian sees dead people in 1980s New York City.

There’s no Sixth Sense–style bombshell in Adler’s imaginative debut novel: Narrator Renata Bronstein reveals in the opening lines that she’s visited by ghosts, many of them gay friends who’ve died of AIDS in these early days of the widening epidemic. But where, she wonders, is Mark, her longtime roommate and best friend, who recently died in Bellevue Hospital at age 29? The loss of Mark haunts her more than any other, since she wasn’t at his bedside and only learned the news from “a friend of a friend” the next morning. Yet he’s not among the apparitions who regularly appear to her, sometimes making requests, sometimes seeking comfort, sometimes “wild-eyed” and screaming. This last is François, Renata and Mark’s East Village neighbor; “his death was the first to really shock me with how ghastly someone could go out,” she says. Unsettled by François’ rage-filled ghost, Renata reluctantly calls the phone number on a flyer for Manhattan Remediation, a mysterious organization that promises to dispatch “odd shadows,” “unexplained sounds,” “weird smells,” and other strange phenomena. But in wiping away the spirits of the dead, are they whitewashing this famously grungy neighborhood? The author sketches an affectionate portrait of Renata’s downtown circle, including her lover, Claude, a nurse at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and Bianca, a trans girlfriend from childhood, as well as the thrift shops, dance clubs, and tenement apartments where these characters congregate. But the novel’s supernatural storyline sits awkwardly atop this more realistic scaffolding, provocatively suggesting a city where the living and the dead always co-mingle but detouring into a caper where our protagonists infiltrate the bad guys’ lair dressed in costumes and wigs, seeking to liberate incarcerated spirits.

An AIDS novel with an original, albeit uneven, approach to the subject of loss.