Susan Sontag, "The Way We Live Now"

burning ankles & noisy bushes

“At first he was just losing weight, he felt only a little ill, Max said to Ellen, and he didn’t call for an appointment with his doctor, according to Greg, because he was managing to keep on working at more or less the same rhythm, but he did stop smoking, Tanya pointed out, which suggests he was frightened, but also that he wanted, even more than he knew, to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few pounds, said Orson, for he told her, Tanya went on, that he expected to be climbing the walls (isn’t that what people say?) and found, to his surprise, that he didn’t miss cigarettes at all and reveled in the sensation of his lungs being ache-free for the first time in years.”

For the past week or two I’ve been couch-ridden with sciatica — hobbling occasionally to the fridge; once or twice venturing as far as the stoop to learn, as the sun set, what sort of a day it had been. I tell you this not to invite your sympathy (though I’ll take it), but because my pain has made me wildly demanding in my reading life. In my reduced state, my tolerance for even the least bit of falsity, for throat-clearing, for anything other than instantaneous and utter honesty, has evaporated entirely. My ankle is on fire — you had better get to the point.

So when, in a more or less random lunge at the bookshelves, I happened to pick up Susan Sontag’s “The Way We Live Now,” I did so with the expectation that I’d read two sentences and then cast it onto my growing heap of discards. I was especially dubious of Sontag (who I’d hardly ever read), because my impression was that she existed at a kind of anti-sweet-spot for me — the overlap between academic pretension and fashionable activism. That this was an uninformed and in certain ways diametrically-opposed-to-reality impression was no matter; I was feeling not only ungenerous but adamant.

Also, “The Way We Live Now”? I knew, vaguely, that this title was a reference to a Trollope novel (which, to be clear, I’ve never read), but it sounded also like just the sort of sweeping, ruminative, abstraction-slinging zeitgeist-survey in which I was least interested. I was reading in the spirit in which a Puritan peers into a bar; I was feeding the engine of my contempt.

Well, I have now tried more sciatica remedies than I can count (my couch is lumpy with pill-bottles, my body is spotted with cupping-bruises) and I can tell you that the most effective treatment I’ve found is this twenty-page Susan Sontag story from 1986. In the twenty or so minutes it took me to read it, I experienced a miracle; I forgot my body entirely.

Which might make you think that “The Way We Live Now” is transporting in the manner of a Pixar trailer — enchanting, colorful, joyous. It isn’t. It’s a brutal, terrifying story, a polyphonic real-time chronicle of what it felt like to be gay as AIDS swept into New York City. It’s transporting in the way that an emergency is transporting. It’s the best and most powerful thing I’ve read about sickness and dying since The Death of Ivan Ilych.

What makes the story so gripping as a reading experience — aside from the intensity of its subject — is the jangly, adrenalized, super-compressed way in which it’s written.

At first he was just losing weight, he felt only a little ill, Max said to Ellen, and he didn’t call for an appointment with his doctor, according to Greg, because he was managing to keep on working at more or less the same rhythm, but he did stop smoking, Tanya pointed out, which suggests he was frightened, but also that he wanted, even more than he knew, to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few pounds, said Orson, for he told her, Tanya went on, that he expected to be climbing the walls (isn’t that what people say?) and found, to his surprise, that he didn’t miss cigarettes at all and reveled in the sensation of his lungs being ache-free for the first time in years.

This is the very first sentence — and don’t you feel already like a full participant in the busy, nervous, hopeful group chat that is the story? There are more names than we can keep track of, and more pieces of crisscrossing information than they can keep track of, but the central matter — the unnamed friend who may be sick with an unnameable disease — is horribly clear.

What Sontag does here — and goes on to do on every page of her story — is to take an ordinary aspect of illness (a man is losing weight and worried about it) and agitate it, chop it up with a blizzard of stuttering commas, so that all the undercurrents of terror and competition and dark hilarity rise to the surface.

…to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few pounds, said Orson, for he told her, Tanya went on…

This is a Beckett-worthy comedy of hopeless communication — only played on fast-forward, and transplanted from the bare stage of an art-house theater into the actual world of missed calls and hospital hallways.

Because this isn’t, for Sontag, philosophy; this is scrupulous realism. The details of the sick man’s condition are perfectly chosen (the distracting and hopeful attempt to quit smoking, the hunt for reasons not to call the doctor) but the greatest authenticity is in the tumult of the style itself. Sontag captures, better than anything I’ve ever read, the breathlessness, the desperation for information, the horrible excitement, of being in the midst of a disaster.

Occasionally I’ll walk by a bush or a tree that, for no reason I can discern, is electric with chittering birds; it sounds like a collective panic attack. For the length of “The Way We Live Now,” Sontag places us inside such a bush. We disappear into the throng of Quentins and Ellens and Gregs and Orsons who populate the story. We forget our individual pains and even our individual identities. We’re chittering for our lives.