| Title | : | People in Trouble |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0452265681 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780452265684 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 240 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1990 |
| Awards | : | Lambda Literary Award Lesbian Fiction (1990) |
The film Rent stole most of its best plot points from this novel.
People in Trouble Reviews
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I bought this at Waterstones in their 2nd hand LGBT section as it was the only fiction book they had about queer women. It was actually much more about activism, gay men dying from aids and the problems of homeleessness in New York. It was really interesting and had some amazing passages. The only problem with it was that the characters were all rather unlikeable. The portrayal of a bisexual woman in an open relationship seemed terribly judgemental and she was pretty horrible. Her husband was just atrocious. The other characters were nice, but had much less of their own story told. Despite that I still enjoyed it. I saw that Sarah has also written a non-fiction book about activism and the gay community in New York in the 90s and I'm tempted to pick that up. This was a really sad book in many ways, the setting with everyone dying was heartbreaking. It made me very glad that the drugs have improved to take care of people with HIV and was a stark insight into what it used to be like.
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ok I'm not giving it 5 stars because it's perfect but it was perfect for me to read right now - the mix of queer life in New York just at the peak of the AIDS epidemic there, ACT-UP, plus hypergentrification, people being shitty, addicted, pathetic, sad, scared, people in trouble. I don't think it's optimistic but there is a lot of space in this novel for a politics of mutual care, survival, dreaming and transformation.
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I first read People in Trouble when it was published in the early '90s, in the thick of the AIDS crisis. AT the time, Schulman was revered as an artist in the LGBT community who believed that art was not enough; activism was also necessary.
Schulman's novels documented the New York lesbian scene set in the context of the AIDS crisis; gay men were the majority of people getting sick, but lesbians stepped up to the plate, as women do, and brought their considerable organizing skills, developed during decades of feminist activism, to the gay male community, who were new to it.
I just re-read People in Trouble for the first time in those 20-odd years (hard to believe that much time has gone by.) While I still have a huge respect for Schulman (especially after reading her most recent nonfiction, THE GENTRIFICATION OF THE MIND, where I learned that 20 years on, instead of scrambling in the mean streets of the Village, she now teaches literature on Staten Island in a public university, and presumably can now make ends meet, but she still has her heart firmly in activism and community service.
All that aside, looking at this somewhat dated novel, which by that very measure serves as a time capsule of the times, I did find that her straight male and female characters are cardboard straw men; she is indicting the art community whose values border on the smug and superficial as they are surrounded by the pain and tragedy of New York society disintegrating around them. Each chapter of this novel is titled with the character whose voice it contains. Kate (bisexual married woman cheating on her husband with a lesbian but she herself does not call herself a lesbian; ever met one of those?), Peter (straight, self-absorbed male artist), and Molly (Lesbian, having an affair with Kate and paying for it, immersed in the scene). This time around, after the first 30 pages, I found myself skipping the Kate and Peter chapters and just reading the Molly chapters. (And I NEVER do that!)
What can I say; time goes by,not every novel holds up. Still, as a testament to the times, People in Trouble is part of a continuum of lesbian novels Schulman has produced, just in case anyone forgets what people went though during the first ten years of the AIDS crisis.
One last note: It is worth pointing out that the AIDS activism group, "JUSTICE" referred to in the book is actually based on the real group,
"ACT UP," whose trademark uniform was black t-shirts with the slogan "ACT UP" over a pink triangle. To see hundreds of these members at a "die-in" in Washington DC, where they would march down the street together and then all lie down in the road was enough to send shivers down my spine. I also have a memory of a protest in Rockville, MD at the Health and Human Services building (they were protesting the lack of government research being done into AIDS) where dozens of police officers wearing rubber gloves (I think they were yellow, but I can't remember but it was a garish sight) sent the most chilling message to the public that PWAs (People with AIDS) were just "germs." There was quite an outcry over that. So even though the scenes in the book were short, they brought back a lot of memories.(less) -
First published in 1990, this is very of its time especially in the way that language is used to talk about queer people and people with AIDS. I loved he writing and the characters, and while it's obviously a difficult book - all about AIDS and grassroots organisations and campaigning for treatment and better services - it's easy to read and not as traumatic as other books I've read about the AIDS crisis as it focusses more on Molly - a lesbian who is on the outskirts of the crisis and trying to help. There's an horrendous property developer who is apparently based on Trump who gets what's coming to him, but I thought that re-issuing this with Trump currently as president was a pretty smart move.
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I read this mainly to form my own opinion on whether Jonathan Larsen plagiarized it to write Rent, and I’ve come to the conclusion that unless writing a musical that takes place during the same time period and also features queer people, homelessness, and art counts as plagiarizing, I don’t think that argument holds much water. None of the plot lines up at all, and while there are extremely vague parallels one could draw between Kate and Maureen, Rent is just a totally different thing.
This book isn’t really my style prose-wise but I thought it had some thoughtful things to say about queerness and the AIDS crisis. It was interesting to see what was incredibly dated and what still feels relevant and poignant today. -
Very of its time in the best way
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3,5
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This book is okay. Its biggest problem is that the three main characters are also the three least interesting characters. Just because the setting and the subject matter are interesting doesn't make a story interesting, but it doesn't hurt. All this book really has going for it is a good setting which it squanders on a cliche love triangle. The emphasis of the book is these three boring characters in a standard love triangle, with a radical historical movement going on in the background. -
This is kind of off the point, but: maybe not the best book to read while you're going through a rough break-up.
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wow. wowowowowow. read this
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3.5 round up to 4. Would be higher if the characters weren’t so awful half the time (and Peter about 95% of the time.) great writing about some terrible people.
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“Sometimes a person has to stop talking about art for a moment and take a look around.”
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4.5☆
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A wonderful novel that puts things into perspective brilliantly. It focuses on the AIDS pandemic in New York, but from the perspective of queer women directly and indirectly involved in Justice (Act UP). It is beautifully queer and challenges labels and boundaries in a real and personal manner. Highly recommend.
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This was a weird, weird book. The dialogue was stilted. The prose was meandering and robotic. There was just enough surrealism (especially toward the end of the story) to make things really strange.
I’m pretty sure I got the gist of what the political message of this book but it’s very much a product of its time. The language used for gender identity and sexual orientation was… dated.
I guess this was sort of interesting as far as getting an idea of how bad the AIDS crisis was. But I didn’t really connect with the story at all. It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t read the entire book but this one wasn’t my favorite. -
As a queer person who now lives in New York, reading about the AIDS crisis and activism efforts in New York hit very close to home. Read this for a queer book club and am very glad I did, but am giving it 3 stars because the writing wasn't necessarily the most compelling to me, even if the topic was incredibly engaging and important.
This novel touches on so many important intersectional topics that connect to the AIDS crisis - internalized homophobia, housing inequality/homelessness, activism burnout, race, apathy, straight privilege and entitlement, economic privilege and entitlement, gender and presentation, straight male entitlement, capitalism and its greed, the role of art, the need for community, unrequited queer love, our human need to connect and love and be loved, and the multifaceted complex love and family and life that is queerness.
Through the 3 main narrators, this book paints a tangible portrait of New York during the AIDS crisis, and I think one of the strengths of this novel is how visceral it is. Schulman writes vivid descriptions of both the narrator's sensations and atmosphere of the city that you can feel in your flesh and bones. And perhaps it is because I am reading about a city I now inhabit, and places I know now (shoutout Cubbyhole) and places that no longer exist, but it felt, even more so than I have in other books, very much like I was walking the streets immersed in the scene.
I liked Schulman's character choice of 3 narrators. Molly, our beloved and often heartbroken lesbian. Kate, her married lover. Peter, Kate's husband (we all hate Peter, but tbh I also hate Kate too). Molly as the person and activist closest to the crisis, Kate as an artist who becomes involved (to an extent) due to Molly, and Peter as an entitled straight(ish) man who is oh so bitter when things are not about him and his straight man worldview. The combination of their perspectives was effectively used to tease out the different complex topics that the book covers, so even if I disliked 2/3 main characters, I think they were the right choices for this story/perspective.
I think the most important aspect of this book was just the very real depiction of ordinary people trying their best to organize and care for one another and fight such a big crisis. It is an authentic rallying call but it is not a glamorized one. It is people doing their best to fight something so immense and demoralizing, when the government and world have not only actively decided to not care, but to capitalize off of queer death. It is the story of people who are tired but trying, of a people in trouble.
Overall, this was a book I enjoyed reading, but was not a can't-put-down-book and is not one I see myself re-reading in its entirety even though I am truly very glad I did read it. I certainly could see myself coming back to some sections, though. Also, Schulman has done incredible work as a journalist, activist, and writer, so even if at times the novel-writing was not my favorite, I do still recommend reading this interesting piece of work if you have the time.
Some select quotes I thought were impactful:
“It was the beginning of the end of the world but not everyone noticed right away. Some people were dying. Some people were busy. Some people were cleaning their houses while the war movie played on television.”
“Everyone on television who died of AIDS got it from a blood transfusion. Or else it was a beautiful young white male professional with ‘everything to live for,’ and even then the show focused on his parents and not him. Why can’t they just say it? Why can’t they just say ‘ass-fucking’ on Channel Four?”
“Jeffrey’s was one short life filled with kindness and mistakes. He was another human being dead for no reason. A regular, special person.”
“This dying had been going on for a long time already. So long, in fact, that there were people alive who didn’t remember life before AIDS”
“They shouldn’t have let him be the spokesman, Peter thought. They should have picked somebody more masculine, so people would be more sympathetic”
“The crowd behaved pretty well. All these months of media blitz had prepared them in some way for this moment. A flurry of simultaneous translation into a variety of languages subsided once the audience was fully informed as to the content of that man’s speech. Some of the visitors murmured with disapproval, others with compassion. Some looked like they wished they hadn’t brought their children. Some tourists brushed it off as one of those ‘typical New York experiences’ they’d heard so much about, then prided themselves on actually encountering. Some took pictures with flash. The men stood quietly, the worshipers sat quietly and the only noise was the voice of the priest droning over the sound system as though these men were nothing, as though they were not there”
“. . . did you know that? Have you been keeping up to date?’ ‘No,’ said Peter, ‘I’m out of date.’ ‘You should correct that,’ Robert said. ‘So that you at least know what it is you feel superior to.’”
“There were ways he wanted to be lied to, like about how much the two women saw each other and how important it had all become. But he wanted the truth when it came to the fact of Molly’s existence. He wanted to hear about a meaningless affair with an unknown woman. Funny at first, the fact that it was a woman threw them both off guard. She didn’t panic and neither did he, because they didn’t expect that to mean anything. It just snuck up on both of them. If it had been a man it never would have gotten this far. Neither Pete nor Kate would have let it happen. Now Peter wanted to know everything and never see any of it. Kate was left with the responsibility of finding some acrobatic technique for accomplishing this unspoken request”
“It is amazing for me to see firsthand the extent to which people calling the hotline will go to deny their homosexuality. There are so many closet cases out there, even when it is anonymous to a stranger over the phone. . . You have to give them every excuse in the world so they can tell you what they did without admitting to being gay. I think we should change the name of this country to the United States of Denial. This epidemic will never be taken care of properly until people can be honest about sex. Not even what they desire, just what they do. And you know, Molly, the world will have to stand on its head before the people who live in it will be honest about what they feel sexually.”
““Molly, do you realize how easily that could have been me?’ Pearl said first thing after getting off the Greyhound bus.
‘I know, I thought of that too. If women could pass it on as easily as men it would be us and our lovers that the world was mourning or ignoring. Instead it’s just our closest friends.’
Then they touched.””
‘“But I love her’
‘So, you can love someone else who’s not going to make you feel like a freak. Get a lover who likes being gay and you’ll be a lot happier.’”
““Kate felt disoriented as she watched Susan negotiate her way across the bar.
‘Isn’t that great?’ she said to Molly.
‘Isn’t what great?’
‘That a straight woman like Susan can feel comfortable coming to a place like this.’
‘Why didn’t you introduce me? By the way, she’s not straight.”
. . .
‘How weird about Susan,’ Kate said. ‘It makes me feel like I don’t really know her. Like I don’t have any idea of who she is.’ Molly didn’t say a word”
“ ‘Lesbians are often better cunnilinguists than men’”
“The family stuck out. They looked miserable, crunched together shrinking from the community of mourning friends, not understanding any of it. They were denying themselves the comfort within arms’ reach. They hadn’t asked enough questions to be of use.
. . .
They didn’t find out who their son was, so when he died they couldn’t understand his funeral. They couldn’t find solace with his friends who had stood united before them. There was a deprivation that accompanies this kind of ignorance. She couldn’t get them out of her mind.”
“Okay, Kate, but our city is so stratified that people can occupy the same physical space and never confront one another. New York is a death camp for thousands of people, but they don’t have to be contained for us to avoid them. The same streets I have fun on are someone else’s hell’”
“‘The gay community,’ James said, ‘is a unique community because our family is bonded on love. Each one of us has defined our lives by love and sexuality - the two greatest human possibilities’ ”
“You can only do so much . . . there are a lot of deprived people in this city. You have to know where they stop and you begin”
“There was an explosion then of shared joy”
“I can’t take care of everybody, Molly said to herself. I just can’t. I can’t do it. This is one of those times that I have to say no. So she looked up at Frank and mouthed ‘No,’ because even when the answer is no, people deserve a response”
“Dear Kate,
Scott died this morning. Life is very short. I can’t waste mine waiting for you to love me enough. There’s something missing in you. I don’t think you know how to love. You just know how to hold on to people. It’s not the same thing.”
“I’m tired,’ she said.
‘I’m tired too,’ James said.
‘So many people are so self-satisfied,’ Molly said. ‘They sit around, they don’t do anything.’
‘Suffering can be stopped,’ James said. ‘But it can never be avenged, so survivors watch television. Men die, their lovers wait to get sick. People eat garbage or worry about their careers. Some lives are more important than others. Some deaths are shocking, some invisible. We are a people in trouble. We do not act.’
Then everyone went to Saint Vincent’s because there was nothing more to say.” -
Oh this is so damn good.
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Schulman’s short 1990 novel was brought up again recently when a journalist noticed that the main named villain in this novel is none other than a roman a clef edition of Donald Trump. Named Ronald Horne, he looms less as a political figure than a dark vague corpulence embodying the worst parts of the 1980s fetish with wealth and power. At the time of writing, Horne and the snarky passages about his dastardly new developments along the waterfront/his offers of sponsorship to corporate art would have rung timely , if a little too pissed off and earnest to seem sophisticated in a landscape where multilayered allusions and ambivalence tend to get more accolades. Today, of course, a reread of this text makes schulman appear at the very least focused and prescient if not prophetic about the direction that New York and America were heading. But leaving the analysis of this as “the villain is Donald Trump!” is limiting.
If the main named villain of the piece is Ronald Horne and all he stands for as a developer hungry for power , the less obvious villains of “people in trouble” are complacency, lack of empathy, and a tendency to excuse oneself when confronted with moral dilemmas. As noted by Schulman, the musical RENT bears startling similarities to this novel in terms of characters and plot components—a half closeted woman artist about to leave her straight male partner, the straight man and his own art and concerns, the queer scene around them, questions of rent strike and politics and AIDS and homelessness. The main difference in terms of content is that where in the late nineties RENT lionized white artists who hate their parents and made poverty porn art and drink and do drugs and go on rent strike for no apparent reason in a milieu where much seems wrong but nobody can satisfactorily explain why, People In Trouble looks at similarly semi-dumb, mostly-oblivious (slightly older) white artists in a similar world, but has a clear vision of the material causes of the problems they see around them. Where RENT and many narratives of HIV and homelessness in New York interpret the issue as senseless tragic decay that can be combated only by uplifting song and a will to continue to party, Schulman paints a portrait of a city in which HIV based housing discrimination is casting people out on the streets, racist rezoning is changing the face of neighborhoods, drug addiction is met with callous ambivalence and lack of services, and white New Yorkers feign innocence and shock.
If the villain of the novel is complicity and silence, the hero is collective action. To be honest, none of Schulman’s main characters are particularly good people. Even the lesbian who the closeted woman leaves her boy for is at best morally conflicted. The real hero of the story is an organization meant to be a fantasy version of ACT UP. There are no visible obvious heroic leaders of this fantasy organization, and their activity takes place mainly in the background, circling closer and closer to the story. On the one hand, I sort of resent the lack of gay male characters and scenes in the novel —the only gay male characters we see are friends of the story’s main actors. On the other hand, I think it speaks to Schulman’s very consistent politics that there are no lionized figures from her own group saving the day for all New York. Instead, salvation (or rather its beginning) comes in the form of decentralized radical action which eventually prompts people to join in and fight back —and perhaps set a real estate developer on fire in a pile of corporate art.
Schulman has always puzzled me as being both an optimist and a pessimist—friendly and outgoing and willing to talk with almost everyone and build coalitions across enormous differences while at the same time having a very cynical view of most activist movements and modern political efforts toward meaningful change. I don’t know if her approach is effective at getting what she wants to get done done. Some people find her condescending or just weird. But this story was good for me to read in order to understand better where she and others from her generation come to us from. -
A very interesting and harrowing snapshot into life during the beginnings of the AIDS crisis in New York. As someone not old enough to have experienced this terrible time myself, I’m glad for any opportunity to delve into queer history. I just wish some of the characters weren’t so absolutely awful. Peter was insufferable but honestly what’s new?
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I thought I really like Sarah Schulman's books.. but maybe that was when I was a 90s lesbian.
The history of the beginnings of the gay response to AIDS is pretty much all that's good about this book. The tactics, reflections on death, politics and fag fashion are all good.
But the tedium of the main plot - a cliche love triangle with a straight couple and the wife's lesbian lover - is just so banal.
The only bit that really stayed with me is the stuff about the early days of responding to AIDS and the differences between the white gay men and the people of colour.
"Scott began the meeting [...] He had a combined air of enthusiasm and serious determination: like a middle-class boy who one day discovered injustice and then proceeded to do something about it with both sincere conviction and class arrogance about getting things done his way." -
had heard such great things about this novel, and of course had heard that RENT had plagiarized from it. Well, I could not engage with the characters at all--they were so detached, from each other and from the reader. And as a huge RENT fan who is quite familiar with the show and the soundtrack, I see little resemblance except the general neighborhood of the East Village, 20 years later.
I really wanted to like this book, and maybe I'll re-visit it some day...but I was disappointed with it. i RARELY do not finish novels, but I could not finish this one. I hated the characters and didn't want to spend any more time with them.
Some lovely descriptions from the author throughout the parts of the book I did read. -
damn, sarah schulman's got it. i am officially obsessed with her this summer. she documents queer life in the late 80's/early 90's in nyc, which is a pretty amazing time in history, and she has this way of ending each chapter with a tiny slice of naked, unvarnished truth, a statement so devastatingly perfect that it sucker-punches you right in the gut. but she makes it sound good while doing it. genius genius genius. love it.
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Really the only non-forgettable part of this book is the fact that parts of the "Rent" storyline are rumored to be lifted from it. Which I discovered minute and a half ago while reading other people's reviews. Otherwise it's pretty much your standard-issue 80s/90s queer New York novel. If you're into that scene, good on you, read this book. Otherwise don't worry about it, you're not missing anything remarkable.
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I just remembered this book! Read it ages ago and loved it. Also remembered that Jonathan Larson completely plagiarized this and that’s why we have Rent, where straight white people are the heroes of the AIDS crisis! Thanks straight white guy!!
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This is the book that the creator of Rent ripped off. Fabulous book - so sad it is out of print.
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3.75 ⭐️
TW: mentions of HIV/AIDS, death, grief, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and discriminatory language
This book is was rather mixed I’d say. I did overall enjoy it but there were some major things that I didn’t like. I’ll discuss them first. Of the three perspectives (molly - a lesbian, Kate - Molly’s lover, and Peter - Kate’s husband) I for the most part liked reading the former two’s but not much of Peter’s. He is just a very unlovable character but I can somewhat sympathasise with some of what he’s going through. However, overall he holds rather descriminatory and uncaring throughts and acts in a selfish manner but then again is in response to himself being unfairly treated by Kate. The other perspectives (which are in 3rd person and I think this narration is a better implementation as the characters are mixed and I don’t think I’d of liked it as much being 1st person) are better but do have their own problems. I also don’t like the inclusion of homophobic and lesbophobic ideas, language and actions specifically when they are being said by an inappropriate character e.g. a ‘bisexual’ women using the f*g word and vice a versa men using dy*e for example. This made me feel rather uncomfortable but in some ways the opneess that Schulman’s language and discussions in the book are good in their own ways.
Following on from this I did feel a lot of the book’s content was ‘wasted’ in a sense where the author includes many discussions about the relationship and other benign things where I personally wanted to know more about ‘justice’ the aids awareness group (I think based on the ‘act up’ organisation) and their actions which were by far much more interesting to read. I also wanted more focus on the queer characters which were comfortable being queer, their stories and actions. However, the book does tackle many issues specifically: the aids epidemic, homelessness, drug/alcohol abuse, classism, being queer in that period (1980s) and how oneself and others views queerness, relationships, infidelity, death and grief among others. These are all addressed rather well specifically with Kate coming to terms (or not) with her bisexuality but she holds a constant ‘other’ approach to being called a lesbian and it’s not that she fully understand’s she is bi but more that she doesn’t want to be labelled as lesbian so her journey is quite interesting but sad to read. Despite not liking all the discussions about relationships and the conversions/actions between the ‘couples’ it does give me Sally Rooney vibes in ‘Conversations With Friends’ due in part to the topic but also Shulman’s ‘open’ writing style where she writes in a matter of fact way that is very real and raw.
Overall, I did enjoy reading this but personally had some reservations so would give it a 3.75. It was quite easy to get through as the chapters are very short and you do want to read on about following the plot, this is more apparent in the latter 2/3rds of the book I’d say where more queer characters and the actions of ‘justice’ are focussed on. I can’t give it any higher as the use of certain language (yes I do have to view in it the time it was written (1990) but still made me uncomfortable) and the focus on some relationships/characters I wasn’t that invested in. Also there is a quite a lot of repetitive scenarios but the ones about the raw descriptions of homelessness and the aids epidemic in NYC are rather hard hitting. Also the ending wasn’t that much to my taste and I did feel it was rather rusher but then again I don’t know how I would have liked it to have ended myself but Yhh.
P.S. but the horrible billionaire property developer Robert Horne (I think that was his name) really gives my Donald Trump vibes and I just couldn’t stop making the connections.
