The American People: Volume 2
The Brutality of Fact: A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In The American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact, Larry Kramer completes his radical reimagining of his country’s history. Ranging from the brothels of 1950s Washington, D.C., to the activism of the 1980s and beyond, Kramer offers an elaborate phantasmagoria of bigoted conspiracists in the halls of power and ordinary individuals suffering their consequences. With wit and bite, Kramer explores (among other things) the sex lives of every recent president; the complicated behavior of America’s two greatest spies, J. Edgar Hoover and James Jesus Angleton; the rise of Sexopolis, the country’s favorite magazine; and the genocidal activities of every branch of our health-care and drug-delivery systems.
The American People: Volume 2 is narrated by (among others) the writer Fred Lemish and his two friends—Dr. Daniel Jerusalem, who works for America’s preeminent health-care institution, and his twin brother, David Jerusalem, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp who was abused by many powerful men. Together they track a terrible plague that intensifies as the government ignores it and depict the bold and imaginative activists who set out to shock the nation’s conscience. In Kramer’s telling, the United States is dedicated to the proposition that very few men are created equal, and those who love other men may be destined for death. Here is a historical novel like no other—satiric and impassioned and driven by an uncompromising moral and literary vision.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kramer's sprawling, intermittently brilliant conclusion of his massive two-volume alternate history (after Search for My Heart) imagines battles within the government over drug testing that leads to an AIDS-like epidemic. From the 1950s through a satirical, nightmarish version of the 1980s ruled by Ronald Reagan stand-in President Ruester, Kramer's characters work inside and outside the system. Strivinv to stop the spread of a deadly virus known as UC, secretly launched by the government to exterminate gay people in the U.S., are G-man David Jerusalem, who starts as an operative in "Hoover's Homosexual Whorehouse," a club run by Hoover to trap and blackmail homosexual spies; David's brother, Daniel, a doctor who assassinates a Ruester appointee planning to oversee a massive quarantine; and screenwriter Fred Lemish, who collaborates with a young, gay prot g of Cary Grant before advocating for gay rights in the '80s. In a style reminiscent of Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, Kramer weaves news blurbs and references to real life celebrities with dozens of fictional characters, spinning rumors about the sexual preferences of such glitterati as Grant and Barbara Stanwyck into narrative threads that entangle with the rise of gay activism in response to government intransigence. This is a feast of relentless gibes and vitriol, shot through with savage humor and earnest passion. Kramer's righteous rage makes for irresistible, provocative reading.
