Unbecoming (Series Q)

Rating:
Summary: The truth, keenly rendered. Skip the Prefaces.
Review: This quiet gem ought not to be overlooked by anyone interested in beautiful writing combined with unsparing, intelligent self-consciousness. From its brilliant title on, Unbecoming is Rousseau's Confessions for the age of AIDS. Skip the various prefaces by well-meaning but uninsightful people (I'd have given the book five stars if the editors had been wise enough to let Michaels speak for himself), and go straight to the journals of Eric Michaels, an American academic teaching in Australia and dying of AIDS. Here you'll find the unmistakable voice of a chastened, ironic, post-'sixties sensibility, a man reflecting on eros, liberatory politics, and moral truths. Though hip and funny, Unbecoming is also painful to read, its cover illustration and author photo painful to look at. But anyone who values self-awareness as much as Michaels obviously did owes it to him or herself to enter into this testament.