Christodora

May 23, 2016
Murphy’s (The Breeders Box) vivid account of the AIDS crisis and its aftermath centers on the venerable Christodora, a 16-story apartment building in New York’s East Village. Erected in 1928, the building has gone through as many changes as the neighborhood. Its current tenants include Jared and Milly, an artistic couple, and Mateo, their adopted son. Mateo, also an artist, is a drug addict (first trying heroin in 12th grade), which turns out to be a part of a complicated legacy of other characters: Hector, an early AIDS activist mourning the loss of his lover; Issy, a young woman who contracts AIDS and becomes pregnant; and Milly’s mother, Ava, an AIDS researcher with a history of mental illness. These characters witness the spread of AIDS, its ultimate politicization, and the attempts to first control and then eradicate the disease in the following decades. Mateo and the other surviving characters come together in an environmentally transformed Manhattan in 2021, where they have one final reckoning with the past. Murphy has written The Bonfire of the Vanities for the age of AIDS, using the same reportorial skills as Tom Wolfe to re-create the changing decades, complete with a pitch-perfect deployment of period detail. Skipping back and forth in time over 40 years, and projecting itself into the near future, the novel achieves a powerful evocation of the plague years. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House.

June 1, 2016
An ambitious social novel informed by an extended perspective on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, from the early 1980s to the near future. Murphy, an experienced reporter on the disease, is plainly inspired by Larry Kramer, whose journalism thundered against anti-gay power structures and whose plays like The Normal Heart dramatized AIDS victims. In his novel, Murphy wants to bring Kramer's vision into the 21st century, though he goes about it with more artistry and less polemic. At the novel's center is Mateo, the adopted son of Milly and Jared, two affluent East Village artists (the title refers to the stately apartment building where they live). In 2009, just as Mateo is leaving high school, he begins a slow slide into heroin addiction, enabled by Hector, a former Christodora resident with a meth habit. Hector was formerly an activist focused on access to AIDS medications, Milly's mother worked for New York's health department when AIDS exploded, and that's just where the convenient coincidences begin. But if Murphy's characters can feel all too neatly arranged amid the plot, fracturing the novel's timeline--leaping from 2001 to 1995 to 1989 to 2021, etc.--helps make these connections more organic and unforced. And the author is expert at inhabiting a variety of mindsets, from Milly's bourgeois anxieties to Mateo's mother's despair as an HIV-positive Latina to Mateo's own capacity to manipulate people to feed his habit. Murphy's big theme is that drugs are a persistent and radically reshaping force, whether it's antiretrovirals, antidepressants, or crystal meth--and are chased after in almost equal measure in a search for a feeling of home. Murphy can't manage every plot thread with equal depth--Mateo's parents are comparatively wan figures. But when Mateo's at the center, as he often is, Murphy has a potent symbol of loss and redemption. A poignant, if carefully manicured, exploration of a health crisis that hasn't yet ended.

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Starred review from July 1, 2016
Activism, addiction, and the redemptive power of art feature prominently in Murphy's perceptive novel about the ongoing aftermath of the AIDS crisis. Milly and Jared, artists with day jobs and good intentions, adopt young Mateo, who was orphaned when his mother died of AIDS, but find that they can't cope when teenage Mateo, now a talented artist, turns to heroin to numb his unceasing grief over his mother. Mateo hangs out with neighbor Hector, a former AIDS activist who salves his personal loss and profound professional burnout with methamphetamine. Their lives intertwine in more ways than either realizes as the two addicts careen toward disaster. As he reveals his characters' backstories, Murphy vividly recaptures 1980s and '90s New York, dampening any pop-culture nostalgia with reminders of the crude pharmacology and callous bureaucracy imposed upon those struggling with AIDS, realities journalist Murphy reported on extensively. His multigenerational tale is a clever inversion of the usual addiction-begets-AIDS narrative and a reminder that despite recent medical advances, the disease still finds ways to ravage people's lives. And if the novel expresses a degree of ambivalence about the recent decline of AIDS activism, it never wavers in its warmth toward its characters, or its insistence upon the possibility of healing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2016

Murphy, who has long reported on HIV/AIDS, LGBT issues, pop culture, travel, and the arts for a wide range of publications, here travels through New York City from the AIDS-scarred 1980s to the hipster-dominated 2000s to the wealth-drenched 2020s, all by focusing on a single East Village building and a well-bred and aspirational couple named Jared and Milly. With an eight-city tour.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.