After Camus by Jay Neugeboren
A troubled marriage—and love story—set against the background of the AIDS pandemic, and the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq lie at the heart of After Camus. Saul Davidoff and Tolle Riordan, who meet during a protest against the Vietnam War, marry, live through the Plague Years of the AIDS epidemic, raise a family … and burn out. Camus is a hero to both of them: Tolle, a young dancer and choreographer, has a liaison with him in Paris shortly before his death; Saul, inspired by Camus’s The Plague, becomes an infectious disease (and AIDS) doctor … and Camus becomes a ghostly presence central to our story.
Hoping to repair their marriage, Tolle and Saul return to a village in the South of France where they lived when they were first in love, and where Camus lived when recovering from a siege of tuberculosis. The novel draws a vivid portrait of a marriage that spans a series of historical events: from the Vietnam war through the AIDs epidemic and Gulf War, to the Iraq War and the advent of the right wing Le Pen movement in France.
After Camus is both a fictional meditation on recent history and a compelling tale of how various forms of love and friendship do and do not survive in times of social and political upheaval. In this novel of enchantments, internationally acclaimed author Jay Neugeboren is at the peak of his powers as a master storyteller.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
JAY NEUGEBOREN is the author of 22 books, including five prize-winning novels, four collections of award-winning stories, and two prize-winning books of non-fiction about mental illness: Imagining Robert:My Brother, Madness, and Survival and Transforming Madness: New Lives for People Living with Mental Illness.
His stories and essays have appeared widely in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Psychiatric Services, Ploughshares, Black Clock,Tablet, Commonweal, among others, and have been reprinted in more than 50 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, Penguin Modern Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories.
He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and is the only author to have won six consecutive Syndicated Fiction Prizes. His archive is housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Center in Austin, Texas.
Nuegeboren was Professor and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, as well as the Director of the Graduate MFA Writing Program there. He has taught at other universities, including Stanford, Indiana, S.U.N.Y. at Old Westbury, and Freiburg (Germany). He now lives and writes in New York City, where he is on the faculty of the Writing Program of the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University.
