Christodora

Several times a year, a few books are published that are so compelling and immersive they simply demand the unadulterated free time of the reader. Tim Murphy's "Christodora" is one of those powerful, ambitious sagas.

A Manhattan-based journalist who has reported from the frontlines of the HIV/AIDS epidemic for two decades in places like POZ magazine, the Advocate and New York magazine, Murphy knows AIDS, and he knows New York City intimately. He imparts this knowledge into a sweeping epic that takes us from the 1980s all the way into a futuristic East Coast (circa 2021), by way of a cast of characters ensconced in an iconic 16-story Gotham apartment building. The folks who populate his pages are difficult to forget, and their legacy fully dramatizes the devastation and frenzied panic of the epidemic.

At the core of the novel is Mateo, orphaned by an HIV+ Latina mother, then the adopted son of Milly and Jared, both affluent East Village artists. Mateo matures throughout the novel: He is a vibrant boy who becomes influenced by another Christodora resident, Hector, a Puerto Rican meth head, with whom he experiments with heroin while barely out of high school. Then he adopts the smooth, fiery-tongued personality of a "hip-hop hipster" living the "art-school thug life."

Hector also becomes a central character as he "unraveled before the neighborhood's eyes, from a handsome, muscular man in his early 40s to a mumbling mess in his early to mid50s, screaming in the street at the dog he cooped up in that tiny basement apartment." Prior to his decline, Hector mourned a lover lost to AIDS and became an activist rallying against homophobia and the ignorance of government agencies who turned a blind eye to the decimation of his tribe.

Murphy's prose is smooth, chatty, and addictive. As the novel progresses, readers will find themselves reveling in the cumulative force of his descriptive powers. Each scene is filled with atmospheric detail, period dialogue, and the intricate nuances of a character's movement, attitude, and emotion.

There is drug use galore in this novel, but Murphy handles it by tapping into both the elegiac, menacing allegiance and physical dependency users experience, as well as the sense of freedom that comes from using: To escape a time and place that has become too intense and miserable can, for some, be a job worthy of a meth high or a heroin injection, a Quaalude, or a dancefloor bump of MDMA. Drugs can also become a saving grace for those plucked from the clutches of death by the advent of anti-retroviral and protease-inhibiting medications. Murphy handles these issues masterfully.

Aside from some overly-manipulated story arcs, some of the chapter progressions can prove bumpy, jolting from one decade to another over the course of 40 years. Readers must recalibrate their sense of place and the ages and demeanors of certain characters.

But these are minor quibbles in a novel that reads like a contemporary motion picture beautifully acted by a durable cast with a been-there-done-that caliber of experience. Murphy has truly outdone himself with a perceptive and accomplished novel that is captivating and immensely entertaining - and features a cure for AIDS at its conclusion!