rameau's ramblings

Let's look at the blurb, shall we.In what Kirkus Reviews calls a “vibrant, accomplished debut-”Kirkus Reviews and I have a different definition of vibrant but I'll give them the accomplished debut. Although I couldn't name names or titles, I'm sure I must have read worse debut books than this. In fact, compared to most regularly published authors Sharlach is off to a stunning start. But a vibrant debut? No.RUNNING IN BED tells the story of a young gay advertising executive struggling to find himself and true love in 1970’s New York.This is the plot summary. If we were to add Rick R. Reed's Caregiver from the boyfriend's point of view you'd have the whole story mapped out for you. Josh is a young man fresh out of school who has moved into the big city and to his first real job. He's still under the illusion that being gay is wrong and unnatural, but with good friends he learns to accept himself the way he is. Then he starts his bumpy road to true love and spends quite a lot of his time sleeping with the frogs hoping to wake up with his Prince in the morning.As this is going on, the author...Author Jeffrey Sharlach paints a brilliant picture of life for a gay man at that moment in history. From the streets of Greenwich Village to summers on Fire Island to the dawn of AIDS-That's the one part of this book I truly enjoyed. Reading about the evolution of Gay Pride parade, GRID to AIDS, film and video, technology. All the details were such that only someone who has spent half his life researching or lived through those events could have written them in so casually. If you'll read the acknowledgements you'll realise Sharlach did both.Sharlach writes with humor, poignancy, and charm, presenting characters who are universal in their appeal.And here is my problem. There's humour in this story, not my kind of humour but humour nonetheless. Poignancy comes with the territory when dealing with life and society altering deadly diseases. AIDS didn't only change the lives of the people who contracted it, it changed the lives of those around them, the families and doctors and lawmakers. The humane loss is always poignant. Charmed, however, I was not. Running in Bed read like an extended diary entry. No time was spent on storytelling. Josh's siblings were mentioned moments before their existence became relevant for the discussion with his parents. A lot of time was spent on Josh pining over Tommy, but it was never shown why Josh came to care for and love him. It never felt like a love story, and I kept waiting Josh to grow out of his fancy for Tommy's looks and start a real relationship with someone he respected. Instead of being told a story, I got a fictionalised memoir of a man who happened to live through the initial turmoil of AIDS and the rise of gay pride. Like Rick R. Reed's Caregiver, Sharlach's Running in Bed suffers from detachment. The story is told dispassionately leaving me as a reader very little to grab ahold of. For all the things Josh's inner commentary reveals, I still don't know what makes him tick. He never became alive to me.Running in Bed’s incomparable, evocative images will resonate with readers, regardless of their personal persuasion.I see they're trying to market this as hetero friendly LGBT novel, and on a certain level it is that: There are no explicit gay sex scenes. Whether or not you'll agree with me about the lack of resonance and evocative images, this is a well written book that tells you what life was like for a young gay man in the dusk of the seventies and in the dawn of the eighties. Just please, don't expect it to be emotionally overpowering.I received an Advanced Readers Copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.