The Hurry-Up Song: A Memoir of Losing My Brother (Living Out)

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: A very artistic memoir of a rather disconnected family and a gay brother dieing of AIDS. Chase, who himself is also gay, weaves the bond that ties the two brothers throughout his book. Mainly childhood conspiracies and special games they created together. In the end, however, as his brother's health failed, he had to face and come to terms with the separatism that one must feel when they cannot truly share something as profoundly significant as death. Like most, he was left to sort out the emotions of the living

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: The admirable thing about this memoir is the way that it looks honestly, even wrenchingly, at devastation, and yet never mythologizes the past or liquifies its events into the mush of sentimentality so common in reflective works. Rather than epic proportions, The Hurry-Up Song is a work of small, quotidian proportions. Chase writes of the games he and his brother would play as children, the songs they would sing, and these games and songs are striking not for their uniqueness but their commonality - these are the games and songs that all suburban children remember. Expressions like "let's not and say we did" are the kind of expressions with which we all would taunt or were taunted. Commercial culture pervades this memoir; Chase often wonders if he acts, in response to the turmoil in his life, the way he has been conditioned to act by watching T.V. The Hurry-Up Song deals with how the empty, clanking images of the commercial machine can be remade as human, but also how the consuming suburban culture disables. Throughout the novel Chase holds out for an absolution, a final, dramatic scene that never quite comes. Again, the phrase, trite at first but then profound, "let's not and say we did" rises up. Rather than a harrowing catharsis and a pat conclusion, Chase is left with a collection of loose ends that resembles the human collection we are always holding. The final chapter of the book is a moving and yet restrained, sublime, sequence in which there is an intimation that Chase's wounds will heal only because they are ready to and he had decided they will. It is a fitting, beautiful ending, a uniting of the wholes, and although it (realistically) avoids conclusion, it moves itself, slowly, towards something new.Will Robinson Sheff