Comfort and Joy: A Novel is a Grim(sley) fairy tale of two lovers with vastly different families, their striking disparity and polarity swimming in a hideous cliché consommé better suited for a Lifetime original series than being committed to so much maudlin bathos imprinted upon acid-free paper. A harrowing Southern smorgasbord of mushy effusiveness, the narrative orbits around the trite notion of coming home for the holidays. Maudlin expressions of sympathy drip off with airline schedule predictability as the reader anxiously awaits the next hastily devised plot point. Mawkish characters counter each other far too neatly: the privileged rich strong handsome doctor (yes, we got the part about his strong shoulders at their fifteenth mention) coupling with the HIV-seropositive weak administrator; top that off with the privileged rich strong handsome doctor’s crusty old money family only a chartered flight away from the latter’s unrisen soufflé of all embracing trailer trash family and you just might find yourself reaching for the air sickness bag from the first class seat in front of you.

Jim Grimsley is a hemophiliac playwright with a singing voice like Aaron Neville, and served as a secretary in the radiology department at downtown Atlanta’s Grady Memorial hospital for nearly two decades. Dan Crell, the child protagonist of Mr. Grimsley’s first novel, Winter Birds, is all grown up and essentially a cathartic exercise in exorcism. Mr. Crell is an HIV-seropositive hemophiliac Grady hospital administrator whose choral talents initially attracted the privileged rich strong handsome Ford McKinney, Savannah scion and hypersincere sleep-deprived pediatrician (vomit). It would be utterly mean-spirited to take potshots at the obviously quasiautobiographical romantic fantasy. What warms over as a lushly overdescriptive narrative soon gets bogged down by so much schmaltzy purple prose that it is rather a pity considering the roads not taken: the very real problems of HIV suffocating relationships, the American gothic nature of growing up poor and homosexual in the south, suffering and pain capitulating to chronic illness and everlasting shame. The fiction is hardly empowering: only a third into the book does the fractious G word manifest, it takes another third for the privileged rich strong handsome Ford to use it in the first person, and only the denouement has the privileged rich strong handsome Ford disclosing this generic Southern secret to his generic family members. Suddenly rushed into winding up, frenetic activity marinates bizarre snippets of highly unlikely conversational prose in a Stairmaster-like drive to accelerate while going nowhere.

This is neither a subtle story nor a particularly well-tailored one. Did I mention that the good doctor was privileged, rich, strong and handsome? Well, the privileged rich strong handsome Ford takes comfort and joy in his partnership with his physically weaker and underprivileged partner in a serrated series of flashbacks. The poor reader, on the other hand, if looking for comfort or joy needs to look elsewhere.

© Sundeep Nayak 2001

Dr. Nayak is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Radiology in the University of California School of Medicine San Francisco and his interests include mental health, medical ethics, and gender studies. A voracious reader and intrepid epicure, he enjoys his keyboards too much and likes to read storybooks which do not repeat their internal themes too often.

Categories: Fiction