This was a hard read, but a good and important read. Exploring so many heavy topics can weigh on a plot. but this author maneuvers through that terrain masterfully.

fascinating novel of New York's Lower East Side and the Christadora during the 1980s and the heartbreaking AIDS epidemic

This is a complex novel, one that took me a while to read - not through lack of enjoyment but through its depth and layers. Christadora is an iconic landmark in Manhattan, a building that has had its fair share of tragedies and seen a lot of change.

The novel is difficult, partly because of its shifting backwards and forwards in time but also because of the characters - the way they link, the way they have connections. As a reader, one learns of something about characters in the future and has to question how they already know it - and it is likely that they read about it in a different context and time, earlier in the novel.

Tim Murphy’s Christadora is a powerful novel which deals with the AIDS crisis in New York in the 1980s. The ending resonates - just as I was feeling there was no hope for poor, alienated Milly, something happens to her which restores my faith - and it gave me that prickly feeling that all quality writing does.

I'm a little late to the party on this one, but I've always wanted to read it based on the description and my GR friends' reviews. It is excellent!

I loved the setting, which was primarily New York City from 1981 to 2021. The heart of the story is the AIDS epidemic and the main characters' lives are all touched and linked together in some way by it. I loved all of the characters, who were beautifully and believably fleshed out. The only quibble I have it the way the story is told. It is a bit of a choppy reading experience, with so many characters and chapters going forwards and backwards in time. At first, I couldn't figure out why he didn't just tell the story in a linear fashion since the flash-backward, flash-forward, flash-sideways thing was interrupting the flow of the story for me. But Murphy has some surprises to reveal and he really couldn't have told it any other way without giving away his secrets.

If you haven't read this yet, I highly recommend it. It's a gem!

A belated thank you to Netgalley and Grove Press for a ARC of this book. My review is based on the hardcover edition.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/09/29/tim_murphy_s_christodora_reviewed.html

Christodora, a novel out this fall from Grove, has got it all: drugs, sex, music, race, class, art, activism, adoption, and tears. It’s a gut-wrenching, happy-ending story told in chapters that jump backward and forward in time all the way from 1981 to 2021. I hope it will be turned into a great movie directed by, say, Gus Van Sant, or Kimberly Peirce, or Steve McQueen.

At the center of the involving, albeit sometimes confusing, narrative is Mateo, the biological child of Ysabel Mendes, a Latina AIDS activist known as “Issy” who dies of the dreaded disease in the early ’90s. Though she worked hard toward effective and affordable treatment, those advances tragically come a few years too late. However, Issy did manage to prevent passing the disease to her son by using AZT, the toxic drug that was for several years the main weapon against death for people living with AIDS like her. Before she dies, she asks her friend Ava Heyman, a city health official (with bipolar disorder), to accept some of the responsibility for looking after Mateo, who lands in an orphanage. Ava’s adult daughter, Millicent, meets Mateo there and persuades her husband, Jared, to adopt him when he’s 5. (In a clever echo of Issy’s challenge, Millicent’s main motivation to adopt rather than give birth is to avoid passing down her mother’s mental illness.)

Millicent and Jared live in the Christodora, a large doorman building in the East Village. The apartment was provided for them by Jared’s father, a wealthy white guy on the Upper East Side. Millicent and Jared are rich white liberal artists and teachers, and they come with all the faults and foibles of the type (and then some). Mateo, the little boy, is a mix of Hispanic and black, and some of the grief in store for the family has roots in the dissonance between the white liberals with good intentions and the black boy increasingly confused by his posh lifestyle.

Another central character is AIDS activist Hector Villanueva, who was once Ysabel’s friend and who also lives, for a while, in the Christodora. It’s a haven where he escapes from his sadness over the death of his lover, using crystal meth and marathon sex with strangers as distractions. (The white people evict him, eventually.) He and Mateo develop an unlikely friendship based first on hardcore drug use and then, more meaningfully, on the shared connection to Issy, whose name Mateo gets tattooed onto his fingers. The most moving scene in the book is when Hector, depressed and ailing, tells Mateo for the first time about Issy and leads him to rare video footage of his fierce and healthy mother demanding equal consideration for women with AIDS.

Tim Murphy, the author of two previous novels, is a reporter who’s been following AIDS activism and life in the East Village for many years, and he’s currently the media coordinator for Gays Against Guns, a group which has adapted ACT UP–style activism to gun policy in the wake of the Pulse shooting in Orlando, Florida. His prose has an easy, fluent style with plentiful references to popular music (Madonna, Leonard Cohen, Lupe Fiasco), historical figures (Ed Koch, Marina Abramovic), and notable places (including in Los Angeles, where some of his scenes are set). He’s good at building scenes into dramatic, sometimes scary climaxes. He’s especially vivid on the subject of drug addiction and the bottoming-out always around the corner for his characters who indulge in the hardest substances—heroin, cocaine, and crystal meth.

In one emotionally harrowing scene shortly after the death of Hector’s lover to AIDS in the early ’90s—an era I recall all too well, having lived through it in New York—Issy calls him to apologize for not showing up at the funeral. She was too ill and is dying herself. It’s the worst of times:

He hung up. Even in his haze, he felt that bad feeling he’d felt with Issy the past six months. It would never be the same again after what had happened. This, he thought on some murky, inchoate level, was what happened as people—a network of people—faced the end, as they realized their collective dreams weren’t coming true, that they were running faster but falling behind, that they were losing coherence and morale. They connected in rash, inappropriate ways, because, most of the time, they were unable to connect at all. The survival instinct was to isolate.

Christodora is itself a response to that isolation instinct—it’s a graceful reaching-out following what must have been, for the author, a long and tortuous reaching-within. Murphy’s troubled characters move deliberately toward but instinctively away from each other, too unsettled and sad to be comfortably together, too human and hopeful to stay apart for long.

Rick Whitaker is author of Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling (1999), The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara: Reading Gay American Writers (2004), and An Honest Ghost, a novel published by Jaded Ibis Press in 2013.

This was delayed significantly because I really couldn't wrap my mind around this book. It started out reminding me of the movie KIDS in a way and then just went left. I liked the writing style at the begining when I wanted to know more about the characters... then... I stopped caring. I know that sounds incredibly cruel... After the middle of the book I cried uncle and stopped reading. I am hoping that the preview copy I was so kindly offered and given will stay in my queue as I am hoping I can pick it up again and try. I enjoyed what I could and I try to write an honest review but I just didn't really connect with the characters.

The Christodora in Manhattan’s East Village is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged and artistic young couple. Through Milly’s art program for kids she meets Mateo and they adopt him. He grows up in the Christadora with his potential for greatness constantly at odds with the wound of his adoption.

Their neighbor, Hector was once a celebrated AIDS activist but is now a lonely addict. It looks like he’s on the way out but one last chance is heading his way.

Enveloping the AIDS epidemic from the hedonistic times just as knowledge of the disease starting becoming known 80’s, the awesome energy of the early Activists.Then moving forward to look at the legacy of the virus in the 2000’s and projecting forward to it’s imagined results in the 2020’s this novel is both an incredibly personal story and equally a social document of an era.

This book is astonishingly good. I consider myself priviledged to work for HIV and sexual health charity Terrence Higgins Trust which was set up in memory of Terrence Higgins, the first man to knowingly die because of AIDS in the UK. I was a little too young to really understand the astonishing activism of the LGBT+ community in the 80’s but as I partied in the 90’s and lost friends to it then I started to become aware not just of the disease but of the incredible spirit of defiance and resilience around me.

When Terry Higgins died his partner was still a teenager. Yet apart from setting up the trust (with friends of Terry’s) he also went on to study medicine and fight both the disease itself and the stigma surrounding it. He is both extraordinary and, like so many other people that this book brings to life, completely ordinary.

Because the characters in here are normal people, They are brave and scared, reckless and careful, determined and unsure, hurting and hitting out, loving and hiding from love. They are gay, straight, white, brown, old, young, educated and dropouts. You will know them or people enough like them for you to understand them.

This isn’t just characters though – there is a very strong storyline running throughout it and some surprise twists and turns along the way. I couldn’t put it down!

Full disclosure – this made me sob on the bus more than once! It might be an idea not to read it in public!

5 Bites

NB I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley in return for an honest review. The BookEaters always write honest reviews

Not really my thing at all, sorry. I gave it a go but it didn't hold my interest long enough for me to get very far with it.

During the late 1920's the 'Christodora', a building situated in Manhattan's East Village was where new immigrants and the poorer members of the community would often find themselves housed. In the 1980's the building was redeveloped and made into luxury apartments where only the affluent could then afford to reside. With the beginnings of gentrification of the area the occupants of these luxurious apartments understandably caused resentment from the less affluent and homeless now unable to afford such accommodation where they'd once had little choice but to reside. Inevitably as tensions grew the infamous riots of New York ensued.

Tim Murphy's masterpiece uses the 'Christodora' as its focal point in the novel and is where its pivotal characters, sculptor Jared Traum and his artist wife Milly, and others live. We also follow a group of interconnected friends, artists, and gay activists over a span of four decades, ranging from the 1980's to 2020.

Being British, I couldn't say that I related much to the drug or gay scene of New York. I did however have gay friends, and some friends who took drugs, but I didn't personally know anyone with HIV.
What I do remember is the paranoia drummed up by the news media and our 'then' Government about the 'AIDS' plague, that a promiscuous gay community had brought upon themselves, and that it was now a threat to all of us if we were bisexual or had more than one sexual partner.
It had also become a requirement for more than one male applying for a joint mortgage and for gay men applying for health insurance, to take an HIV test before consideration. A positive result meant refusal of application, and a blemish on medical files, forever! Eventually we were better informed about this horrific, unprejudiced virus which would claim people from all walks of life, gender and sexual orientation.

'Christodora' educated me in many ways about the HIV plight of the 1980's and of the role 'gay activists' and scientists in America played in the fight for medical research, better health care, and legal rights for both gay men and lesbian women. It is because of these dedicated brave individuals that AIDS no longer needs to lead to a premature death or that its sufferers be subjected to discrimination, prejudice and fear.

Tim Murphy writes with real depth and clarity about his characters that it's hard to believe they aren't living and breathing people. One character's narrative had such a powerful impact on me that I felt breathless and giddy reading as she ploughed from one scene to another with a volatile energy gathering in pace and momentum, and with her increasing irrational, embarrassing and inappropriate behaviour. I felt 'manic', my head was in turmoil. Ava and the symptoms of her bi-polar disorder are so incredibly well written, I felt as if I was in the same headspace...as uncomfortable as this was it was brilliantly done!

Overlong at times, and confusing with time shifts leaping back and forth as characters gave their points of view, it was definitely worth the perseverance as I was rewarded with the 'payoff' as gradually everything made sense and the segments slowly slotted into place.

Hugely encyclopaedic in scope 'Christodora' is also a raw emotive 'coming of age' tale of sorts. I found every character compelling from the aforementioned Ava, struggling with her manic episodes, to one of the most intriguing but equally frustrating, and at times intensely unlikeable characters in the book, Hugo Villanueva.

'Christodora' is intelligently, and compassionately written with complex, flawed individuals, and evokes a real sense of an era full of fun, passion, pace and energy, with a vibe of the creative arts, and excitement of the music industry; then it turns on itself like a rabid dog and relentlessly drives us down into an abyss with descriptions of the devastating catastrophic effects of drug abuse (chiefly meth addiction), and the fear, pain and despair of losing, or leaving behind, friends and loved ones because of an unknown disease.

Utterly compelling and educational in respect of the relationships and interrelationships of the characters before, during, and after the emergence of a devastating disease that cut dead the excitement and euphoria of the gay, drug and disco days of the 80's...Highly recommended.

Where do I even begin with "Christodora"? The large, sweeping novel starts in the Christodora building, where Jared, Milly, and their adopted son Mateo, are becoming a family. The time span travels from the seventies to 2021, and it feels as if the whole narrative of the family, all of the dynamics, all of the problems and history of drug use, history of fighting for equal rights for HIV+ people throughout the country, and the history of the family, the riffs and splinters and heartbreak that happens in every family to some degree, all of this feels like it is a memoir and not a novel. Murphy's ability to write several different characters, from white women to gay latino men, with such a strength made me forget that I was reading a novel, and that this was not a nonfiction book about the people that Murphy knows. This is a rare feat with a novelist. I was hooked from the very first page to the last. When I read a 500 page book, I usually expect a lag somewhere in the middle, where the emotion drops until it starts to build for the ending, but Murphy kept the tension and emotion high enough to where I did not want to put it down at any time. I was skeptical when he started the chapter with the date of 2021, but ended up being impressed by the way that he did not go into outlandish ideas about the future. No flying cars and robot maids, just technology a little more streamlined and cars a little more eco-friendly. This is a relief, and the one section that could've ruined the entire book for me ended up being as believable and compelling as the rest. I cannot stress how much I recommend this to anyone, even those casual readers that ask for recommendations. This is a great literary novel that reads like a page-turning best seller. "Christodora," is a rare novel, and I cannot recommend it enough.