Hartley Mims arrives in New York in 1980 to embark on an artistic career and establish a brilliant circle of friends. He succeeds at least in gathering a ragtag band of artists - sexually venturesome, gifted, ambitious, and hungry. His circle faces muggings, bad reviews, and the even greater dangers of each other's boundless, toxic ardour. Just as the group is becoming artistically notorious, then latently immortal, an unaccountable disease makes its own career move among them. How such colourful egoistic pals close ranks and nurse each other provides the 'After' to one long, good, yet interrupted party. The circle's greatest art becomes that most unlikely of human masterpieces: a utopian community. Written with erotic candour and wild comic energy, Plays Well with Others is an essential fable of our time. Allan Gurganus has written the long-awaited great novel of the AIDS pandemic.
