Rating: 
Summary: Deeply touching
Review: Plays well with others is a poignant story of friendship, AIDS,life. Allan Gurganus writes exceedingly brilliantly and the story is deeply touching. I found myself thinking about its characters even several days after i had finished the book.The three main characters, narrator and writer, Hartley, artist and painter, Angie and the beautiful party animal and composer, Robert live their intertwined lives in gay New York before and during the beginning of the AIds crisis. as teh book unfolds, they and the reader are lead into thinking about friendship, love and the meaning of life. Both hartley and angie love and lust for RobertRobertRobert. Robert's character may seem somewhat underdeveloped to some, but i thought this lent more sadness and complexity to the him, trapped by his own beauty, goodness and desires. An excellent book.
Rating:
Summary: Sublime.
Review: This is a painful book to read. It's also a deeply flawed book. But those flaws, like the characters within, and the world without, yield its momentum and reveal its consolations. The beginning: forced.
The development: surprisingly anti-climactic.
The end: painfully drawn out.
The conclusion: transcendent.
Don't you recognize this? The New York Times is wrong - any disbelief in this book is purile cynicism. Plays Well With Others does not lie. It reveals our lies. And affirms them.
Rating: 
Summary: Well Played
Review: This is a wildly alive and comic novel of the AIDS crisis. In the late 70s young writer Harley Mims moves to New York City and promptly falls into a deep friendship with Angie, a raucous talented painter, and Robert, a gifted composer as well as "the most beautiful man in town". The novel lovingly chronicles the highs and lows of this trio as they f*ck, frolic, and establish themselves as artists - oblivious to the specter of AIDS looming on the horizon. As the pandemic slowly surfaces we see a culture decimated by disease, but in the face of panic and death the virus only serves to strengthen the forces of friendship and intimacy among the group. This bond carries over into the care giving and making peace process, which became the adopted lifestyle of a generation. Funny, sexy, smart, and thoroughly rewarding, this is a novel to make you laugh; cry, and most importantly appreciate the awesome and immortal force of friendship
Rating:
Summary: A Very Hard Story To Tell
Review: This was a very hard story to tell and it is masterfully done. The time frame is the almost holocaust-like period in America when AIDS was considered the "curse". It must have been very difficult to abstract all the events and feelings into print form. He truely wrote without a net. His story jostled my memories of the same period where all my college compatriots went off to NYC and were later shipped home in red plastic bags. Embalming and church burials were out of the question. Try telling your story. The only fault is the lack of the authors telling us how this really affected him. He told almost too much though. Well Done.
Rating:
Summary: Sublime
Review: This was my first Gurganus novel. I absolutely adored it. It makes me want to read all of his work. There's nothing I love better than a well-written novel which engrosses me completely. I read Plays Well With Others over the course of about 48 hours. I would have read it faster but I work, have a husband and a toddler. Fundamental religious types will definitely object to the homosexual themes. However, I found the incident with the dildoes both screamingly funny and heart-breaking. (As did my 69-year-old mother.) Having spent time in the New York City arts community during the 80s, Gurganus makes me yearn for my past. He also sensitively depicts the atmosphere of fear and paranoia during the early AIDS years. If the rest of his books are as good as this one, I will be a very happy woman.
Rating:
Summary: I Want More!
Review: This was my first Gurganus novel. I absolutely adored it. It makes me want to read all of his work. There's nothing I love better than a well-written novel which engrosses me completely. I read Plays Well With Others over the course of about 48 hours. I would have read it faster but I work, have a husband and a toddler. Fundamental religious types will definitely object to the homosexual themes. However, I found the incident with the dildoes both screamingly funny and heart-breaking. (As did my 69-year-old mother.) Having spent time in the New York City arts community during the 80s, Gurganus makes me yearn for my past. He also sensitively depicts the atmosphere of fear and paranoia during the early AIDS years. If the rest of his books are as good as this one, I will be a very happy woman.
Rating:
Summary: Poignant
Review: What this book reminded me of was the song "Lady in Red" by Chris Deburgh. I understand the song was written in about 30 minutes - like a quick sketch - so it retained all the immediacy of someone who was writing down impressions and feelings while they were still fresh. Then he presented them unedited with all the immediacy intact. It may not have been the best song ever written, but it touched a chord because the emotions were so raw, and the feelings were so sincere.
"Plays Well with Others" is very obviously a not very well-camouflaged autobiographical tribute to the author's friends, who lived in pre-AIDS New York during a time period the author refers to as "Before", then died there of the "plague". The writing is rough, and these friends are idealized to the point where you seriously doubt they were as clever, talented and unique as the author depicted them, but the emotions are very real, and the author is trying to describe people striving for a creative life and are at the very verge of great things, when they are all cut down by the sudden, unexpected and very deadly onset of AIDS.
The important things are the emotions and the pain. Part of the beauty of his writing style in this book is the spontaneous feel you get from it. You feel as though you're really reading a story written by someone who experienced all the pain of watching his friends die one by one until his only relief came from knowing they were finally all gone and he had no more friends to lose. That same sense of immediacy is there to remind you that someone real is mourning people who were real. And their deaths were a loss and a tragedy, not only to the author. They represent all the people who died, and are dying now. They were loved and cherished and had great plans to do great things. Instead of doing those great things, they left behind one good friend to clean up the mess, usher in their grieving parents, and write a book so they wouldn't be forgotten.
It's almost diary-like in the way he wrote it. Approach it like you're reading someone's diary, and you'll be more forgiving than some of the reviewers who focused on the book as "fiction" and expected it to read like Gurganus' other great novel, "Confederate Widow". It's nothing like the first book. Please don't compare them. And when you read it, presume there is real grief behind the words - I see it there, anyway.
Just read it as the tribute it is, and use it as a means through which you might understand what all it was like, for one person at least.
Rating:
Summary: I really loved this book.
Review: Why does the reveiwer from the NY Times know about keeping cocaine in the refrigerator? This is a wonderful book. It will make you laugh as well as cry real tears in public.
Rating: 
Summary: "Plays Well" plays OK
Review: Yes he is a prose genius (that dildo scene on the subway is practically worth the price of the book--I peed on myself)! And he is daring, such as the homoerotic scene between him and his elderly father fighting over a TV remote. I read Gurganus's beautiful passages over and over (thus doubling the amount of time it should have taken me to finish the novel). But some of the supporting characters were so lightly sketched that once they ALL started dying from AIDS(Robert excepted), I didn't care because I couldn't remember who they were. The ending petered out, too, but oh, the gentleman has a way with words!
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