Talbott Street

Book excerpt: Talbot Street is a contemporary literary novel with mainstream appeal which explores the subjects of love, fidelity, death, and disease through the mysterious and long-standing friendship of its two major characters, Nick and Johnnie R. The action unfolds in the present through a series of flashbacks by the narrator, Nick, as he sits at the bedside of the dying Johnnie R. As Nick reminisces, the novel fluctuates between present and past as Johnnie R. slowly dies of AIDS, and the mysterious facts surrounding their break of eight years earlier are divulged as the novel progresses with each new flashback. With the help of Johnnie R.'s journal of poems, anecdotes, and explorations, the narrator's powerful ruminations pull the reader well beyond the death at hand and through the emotional and gripping wake of a passionate friendship spanning twenty years, two continents, and the interstices of the human soul. Nick, the southern narrator, is a highly introspective man in his mid-thirties who returns to Indianapolis in December of 1991 at the request of his dying friend, Johnnie R. Nick is heterosexual and Johnnie R. is bisexual. They first met at Princeton, separated upon graduation as Nick took up his expatriate career in the Foreign Service and reunited five years later in Indianapolis where Nick was drawn into the nightmarish realm of Johnnie R.'s married and professional banker's life. Caught in the webs of Johnnie R.'s endless social and professional intrigues, Nick also met and fell in love with Johnnie R.'s lovely artist wife, Charly (for Charlene). Though Charly is attempting to mend her fragile marriage to Johnnie R. (following the disclosure of his bisexuality) she allows herself the single infidelity with Nick. The tragic triangle is formed, then brutally broken. Nick then departs, only to return eight years later as Johnnie R. dies of AIDS. Nick and Johnnie R. now become reacquainted in the hospital, and it is when Johnnie R. sleeps that Nick relates the sometimes tragic, oftentimes mysterious, history of their friendship. Although the novel centers on the triangle, it is populated with a variety of characters: a slick hustler named Danny alias, the kid; Johnnie R.'s tough-as-nails father; Charly's dead brother; Mike, a scandalized homosexual bank executive; and the three hospital patients known as the three Queens. The single symbol which weaves them together (along with the many issues revolving around AIDS) is Talbott Street. A talisman of disparate meanings, it is an Indianapolis ghetto bar, a residential street address in London, the macabre scene of a senseless murder, an untitled series of mysterious paintings, the seat of scandal. Nick finds the intertwining of the several images that compose Talbot Street and enigma impossible to ignore, and as he reflects on the past he also traces the meaning of Talbot Street. The narrator, hyper-conscious, ever-ruminating, uncovers a tragic irony when he discovers a nexus among seemingly unrelated events with the help of the virus. The novel's two separate themes of friendship and disease find resolution as the mysterious past enlightens us as to the many contemporary meanings of HIV. This highlights and accentuates the mysterious and parallel manner in which both the human memory and HIV operate. As with memory, HIV lurks in the background, dormant, awaiting a host. The hidden past awaits to be mined, and within the past lies HIV. In order to find a viable reference to meaning in the present, whether in regard to AIDS or the mysteries informing the long-standing friendship of Nick and Johnnie R., we are thrust ceaselessly into the past.