The American People Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact
By Larry Kramer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

On page 862 of his 880-page new novel The Brutality of Fact (Volume 2 of “The American People”), Larry Kramer’s stand-in character confesses, “It is very difficult to write about a plague.” In a very real sense, and in a far more merciful world, that single line could serve quite well as both a summary of the book and verdict on it. 

Readers already familiar with Volume 1 of “The American People,” Search for My Heart, will already know that the sprawling, manic world Kramer has created in this pair of books is anything but merciful. The first book was a psycho-sexual fever-dream of American history, full of walk-on parts for dozens of iconic textbook figures who shambled on-stage, made scabrous quips, dribbled some unmedicated mucus, then shambled off-stage so the next reputation could come into view and get savaged. The number of readers - or reviewers - who finished Search for My Heart and said, “Yes, I understood that” … well, it’s likely a very, very small number, notable mainly for its manifest psychological problems. 

In The Brutality of Fact, Kramer finishes that alternate history by dramatizing his own participation in it: this is the greatest, most alarming, most insane AIDS novel anybody is ever going to write or want to write, and it’s an open question whether or not anybody wants to read it. Should read it, absolutely should read it, but want to? “Brutality” is apt.

After President Truman, after Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford, after Johnson, Kennedy, and Carter, comes … President Peter Reuster, and Kramer is crystalline about his legacy:

Peter Ruester will be responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler. You do remember Adolf Hitler? In fact Peter Ruester will be responsible for more deaths than Joseph Stalin. Did you even known Stalin murdered more people than Hitler?

As Edward Gibbon said, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

Read on, Fred’s American People, read on and weep. The era of your greatest heartbreak is about to begin.

That heartbreak is here presented in ghastly, febrile detail by dual narrators, one human and one decidedly not:

Your Roving Historian welcomes you back. Let us continue to follow our bouncing ball.

This is your virus speaking. I, too, am glad you’ve come back to learn more about my taking over the world. Your author considers anger “a healthy and productive motivating force.” Thank goodness he talks too much and accomplishes so little and words are cheap. My English is much better now, don’t you think? My anger is also what is motivating me. And I am, as you would say, “getting my own back.” 

And aside from any Roving Historian or sentient virus or fictional stand-ins, there’s also Larry Kramer himself, fiercely present on virtually every page of the book, reminding readers that he’s been yelling at them for half a century. “Always remember that in medicine, in science, as in all else, successful obsession is the name of the game,” the narrative goes. “It is not always the calm, composed, decent, fair, thorough, gracious, noble, generous, moral, upstanding, honest, and unidentified person who claims the Answer. It is often the crank, the crazy, the nutcase, the person no one can stand and many people hate.”  In a novel full of characters with Pynchonesque names like Gree Bohunk, Dr. J. Purnold Drydeck, Manny Moose, and Dr. Tom Tom, plain old real-world Larry Kramer, without ever being named or naming himself, tends to stand out the most. 

The book is a whiteout blizzard of anger, outrage, showboating, and satire, a dark epic just crying out for a long review by the late John Leonard. It consists of broad, waterless islands of sandy polemic endurance-tests, acidic riffing on Reagan-era details only 14 of its readers will recall, and a cynicism so all-encompassing that threatens to turn the whole enormous thing into a dirge. 

The saving grace - and Kramer would no doubt scorn both the value and the need for a saving grace - is that this is a brilliant author, a writer of necessary, beautiful vision. Over and over in The Brutality of Fact, far more often than in Search for My Heart (for obvious reasons), that vision surfaces almost against the momentum of the narrative itself and opens a shaft of the pure empathy that is at the heart of all outrage. It happens in simple, almost choppy sentences of forensic truth, showing shapshots of the AIDS epidemic with the clarity of a nightmare:

This time it’s the doctor who’s dying. His name is Tim. He’s had a hard time of it, struggling now just to breathe. He breathes for Craig, for Craig who loves him and won’t let him stop, the breathing, the living, the loving. Yes, it’s been a good ten years. They’ve had the best of it. That they know. That they’ve told each other every day. Only now he can’t breathe and Craig can’t inspire air into his lungs by pure devotion. The machines by his bedside in this private room in his own hospital, St. Victim’s, aren’t helping anymore. Craig wishes his own breathing would stop. He knows he’ll live and he knows that without Tim he doesn’t want to. Oh, these are just romantic notions, of death and love. Too many movies. Too many bad TV dramas. Too many tears. Why is sentiment so out of fashion when it’s what’s needed most? He has these thoughts while his fingers fool with his tools. He won’t look at his hands. He won’t look at what they’re holding. He looks only at Tim’s heart. His chest is wet with sweat. He lies naked in the hospital bed, all shriveled up, all of him, from the locks of his hair all gunked together to his toenails now peculiarly warped and gray. The only flat smooth place, like some very old stone in a very old stream, is his chest. How Craig loved to kiss him all over that godlike chest, not at all like his own stubby bumpy thing. Even now, his hands want to run themselves across that last outpost of Tim’s beauty and feel the smoothness, still. 

The thing in Craig’s hands, the thing he doesn’t want to look at, is a syringe of potassium his lover has asked Craig to plunge directly into his heart, to free him from the disease. And in an ecstasy of pain and love, Craig does it. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.