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In Memory of Angel Clare: A Novel
The new novel by the bestselling author of Hold Tight, this brilliant comedy of manners set among a group of Manhattan sophisticates depicts the friends of a dead filmmaker trying to put their lives back together--a task made more arduous by the young boyfriend he left behind.
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First published July 1, 1990
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About the author
Christopher Bram
30 books124 followersBram grew up in Kempsville, Virginia. After graduating from the College of William and Mary in 1974 (B.A. in English), he moved to New York City four years later. There, he met his lifelong partner, documentary filmmaker Draper Shreeve.
Bram's novel Father of Frankenstein, about film director James Whale, was made into the movie Gods and Monsters starring Ian McKellen and Brendan Fraser. Bill Condon adapted the screenplay and directed. Condon won an Academy Award for his adaptation.
In 2001, Bram was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2003, he received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He currently resides in New York.
Bram's novel Father of Frankenstein, about film director James Whale, was made into the movie Gods and Monsters starring Ian McKellen and Brendan Fraser. Bill Condon adapted the screenplay and directed. Condon won an Academy Award for his adaptation.
In 2001, Bram was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2003, he received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He currently resides in New York.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 4, 2015
What happens to those left behind?
This is an engaging story involving a group of friends. It is written in a way that reminds me of 'Tales of the City' although the stories are very different.
When Clarence passes away he leaves behind his much younger boyfriend Michael and a group of close friends. One year later Michael is still deep in grief and struggling to make sense of what he had with Clarence and what he has now lost.
Michael the younger boyfriend finds himself having to make a new life for himself and this isn't easy when your life for the past few years has been focused on the one who is gone.
Michael now has no real friends of his own having very much made friends of Clarence's friends and yet Clarence's friends have their own lives and no space for the young boyfriend of an old friend who is now gone, especially one year later. And besides they don't really like Michael.
Michael doesn't realise things have changed but slowly he realises that he must now move on without Clarence and this means renegotiating his relationship with their former friends but he doesn't know how to do this. He might appear disdainful on the outside but on the inside he is lonely, fearful and regretting the way he treated Clarence at the end.
The friends also have their own regrets about Clarence. Jack feels he didn't do enough when Clarence was dying but he misses his friend. He didn't always like Clarence but now he is gone there is a gap. Ben feels he did too much for Clarence and that Jack should have done more.
Each friend has their own experience of grief for Clarence as they remember the past. And each of them doesn't really know how to respond to Michael, this partner of Clarence who is still very much in their lives even though they don't want him to be.
This is a story about grief and the impact of death on those left behind. It is a story about the emotions and the memories and regrets that rise to the surface during the course of grief. It explores the impact of death on the living and the way in which people grieve and seek ways forward.
I did enjoy this story. It tells a moving story without angst or overdone emotions. It tells this story from the eyes of an observer, revisiting the past and examining the different relationships from different points of view. It also shows how difficult it can be to move forward in life especially after loss and the changes that need to be embraced and somehow responded to.
The book is written in a very clear way with great dialogue and a good pace. I enjoyed reading this and wish it had a sequel.
This is an engaging story involving a group of friends. It is written in a way that reminds me of 'Tales of the City' although the stories are very different.
When Clarence passes away he leaves behind his much younger boyfriend Michael and a group of close friends. One year later Michael is still deep in grief and struggling to make sense of what he had with Clarence and what he has now lost.
Michael the younger boyfriend finds himself having to make a new life for himself and this isn't easy when your life for the past few years has been focused on the one who is gone.
Michael now has no real friends of his own having very much made friends of Clarence's friends and yet Clarence's friends have their own lives and no space for the young boyfriend of an old friend who is now gone, especially one year later. And besides they don't really like Michael.
Michael doesn't realise things have changed but slowly he realises that he must now move on without Clarence and this means renegotiating his relationship with their former friends but he doesn't know how to do this. He might appear disdainful on the outside but on the inside he is lonely, fearful and regretting the way he treated Clarence at the end.
The friends also have their own regrets about Clarence. Jack feels he didn't do enough when Clarence was dying but he misses his friend. He didn't always like Clarence but now he is gone there is a gap. Ben feels he did too much for Clarence and that Jack should have done more.
Each friend has their own experience of grief for Clarence as they remember the past. And each of them doesn't really know how to respond to Michael, this partner of Clarence who is still very much in their lives even though they don't want him to be.
This is a story about grief and the impact of death on those left behind. It is a story about the emotions and the memories and regrets that rise to the surface during the course of grief. It explores the impact of death on the living and the way in which people grieve and seek ways forward.
I did enjoy this story. It tells a moving story without angst or overdone emotions. It tells this story from the eyes of an observer, revisiting the past and examining the different relationships from different points of view. It also shows how difficult it can be to move forward in life especially after loss and the changes that need to be embraced and somehow responded to.
The book is written in a very clear way with great dialogue and a good pace. I enjoyed reading this and wish it had a sequel.
March 25, 2016
I loved this book. I probably couldn't have read it in 1989 when it was released. Books like this were too close to my own life. Today I was able to not only read it, but love it. Bram's collection of Clarence's friends and boyfriend made me happy remembering my own decade in NYC making all kinds of memories during the darkest of times. Thrilled to know In Memory of Angel Clare not only stands the test of time, but makes me smile. A truly great read of an unexpected time in our lives.
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August 13, 2017This is a bittersweet novel of a younger man's memories of an older lover who has died of AIDS. Clarence was in his mid thirties when he died, leaving behind friends a young lover. Michael is the young lover, and we first meet him he's touring Paris..He has had two hookuos already and meets a young man in an art gallery. As we see Michael at the tender age of 23, can be as cruel and callous as someone older. The two young men decide to go out for dinner and more, that is when (while in restaurant) he sees friends of Clarence and his and the guilt rushes in. Even though, Clare (as friends call him) has been dead for 3 years. We also learn that Michael hasn't moved on from Clare's death, in fact he seems consumed with it. He lives in the apartment which Clarence and he shared and which a lesbian couple have purchased still, he looks at a bad horror film which Clare directed, and he reads old letters that a younger Clare wrote to a friend while traveling. Michael also hangs out with Clarence older friends, and they all seem to have grown tired of the younger man. Michael as we read, is self-absorbed,unaware, cruel , and callous. The two women who he lives with rent free are ready for him to move out of their apartment.Another friend suggest it be broken to Michael as tenderly, Jack (the friend) suggest that Michael stay with him till he finds a place. Michael seems to take up a lot of space emotionally. This novel makes you think. Is there a timetable on grief? Just another well written novel by Christopher Bram.
August 10, 2018
Somehow, I’ve never read Christopher Bram before. Very natural writer with an ease in creating believable, whole characters. Set during the AIDS crisis in NYC, the novel feels very much like being an outsider looking into the grief felt by one set of friends.
August 24, 2011
This book just didn't grab me. Not a good balance between description or scene-setting and dialogue. I just couldn't feel that I should care about these characters.
September 5, 2017
Published in 1989 by Christopher Bram comes a very sentimental story that builds to a suspenseful last few chapters. I love Christopher Bram books. He's my favorite author and this one sat on my shelf for a while. At first I wasn't in a hurry to read it as it dealt with a young man mourning a death; however, there is more to story and much to take from it. Outstanding--even today, almost 30 years later. Here are some lines in the book I chose to underline because they struck me for some reason or another:
T.S. ELIOT (Little Gidding):
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
Michael liked to skip the introductory stages of things, trusting the basics would come to him later.
Grief was such a pure, honest emotion.
A kind, clean-shaven, shorthaired, thirty-ish Austrian kindly asked it I was lost and sat down beside me to tell me I should visit some of Vienna’s many churches. He pointed to them on the map in my lap, poking at the map until I began to notice—smart boy—h0w many churches were located in the vicinity of my penis. When I did not scurry off, he offered to give me a personal tour of the nearby university, which was closed for the night.
“So those letters are a document of his sexual awakening, his invention of his identity as a gay man during an age when you had to do it all yourself…”
Michael sometimes thought about naked men, but he didn’t think that made him gay. Such homosexual fantasies were a symptom of loneliness, he believed. He’d been having these thoughts since high school, but he’d been lonely since high school. And he had these thoughts only when he was alone. Sometimes particular guys, sometimes just any guy…
There was something satisfying about being noticed when you had no interest in meeting anyone, when you were safely above all that.
There was a small clearing in the dancing crowd. Michael began to dance, hoping to lose himself in that. He felt foolish dancing alone, so he tried to dance with some of the bodies sawing and swaying around him.
“I’m not asking you to have sex or even kiss me. Won’t you just let me HOLD you for a few minutes?”
Memory is imperfect knowledge. People often remember only what is safe to remember or, when they need to punish themselves, what hurts them most.
Silence was so rare it was suspenseful.
“…you sounded like two Vietnam vets bickering over who had the worse tour of duty, (a favorite line…she left out her line about both vets spending their tours as typists at headquarters).”
He was such a BUFFOON, he told himself. He often found refuge in that description—you cannot be blamed for your failings when you are by nature just a BUFFOON.
He often took a bath himself when he was depressed or wanted a long, deliberate wank—usually one and the same thing.
He loved ART and SEX and FILMMAKING because he could lose himself in them.
SEX was fun and romance a lark and nothing was permanent but CHANGE.
“You know what Fitzgerald said, In your thirties you want friends, in your forties you know friends won’t save you any more than LOVE did.”
He would die. Everyone in this room would die. It was one thing to know that, and something else to feel it. Mortality made most of their failings seem minor, tender, and bearable.
T.S. ELIOT (Little Gidding):
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
Michael liked to skip the introductory stages of things, trusting the basics would come to him later.
Grief was such a pure, honest emotion.
A kind, clean-shaven, shorthaired, thirty-ish Austrian kindly asked it I was lost and sat down beside me to tell me I should visit some of Vienna’s many churches. He pointed to them on the map in my lap, poking at the map until I began to notice—smart boy—h0w many churches were located in the vicinity of my penis. When I did not scurry off, he offered to give me a personal tour of the nearby university, which was closed for the night.
“So those letters are a document of his sexual awakening, his invention of his identity as a gay man during an age when you had to do it all yourself…”
Michael sometimes thought about naked men, but he didn’t think that made him gay. Such homosexual fantasies were a symptom of loneliness, he believed. He’d been having these thoughts since high school, but he’d been lonely since high school. And he had these thoughts only when he was alone. Sometimes particular guys, sometimes just any guy…
There was something satisfying about being noticed when you had no interest in meeting anyone, when you were safely above all that.
There was a small clearing in the dancing crowd. Michael began to dance, hoping to lose himself in that. He felt foolish dancing alone, so he tried to dance with some of the bodies sawing and swaying around him.
“I’m not asking you to have sex or even kiss me. Won’t you just let me HOLD you for a few minutes?”
Memory is imperfect knowledge. People often remember only what is safe to remember or, when they need to punish themselves, what hurts them most.
Silence was so rare it was suspenseful.
“…you sounded like two Vietnam vets bickering over who had the worse tour of duty, (a favorite line…she left out her line about both vets spending their tours as typists at headquarters).”
He was such a BUFFOON, he told himself. He often found refuge in that description—you cannot be blamed for your failings when you are by nature just a BUFFOON.
He often took a bath himself when he was depressed or wanted a long, deliberate wank—usually one and the same thing.
He loved ART and SEX and FILMMAKING because he could lose himself in them.
SEX was fun and romance a lark and nothing was permanent but CHANGE.
“You know what Fitzgerald said, In your thirties you want friends, in your forties you know friends won’t save you any more than LOVE did.”
He would die. Everyone in this room would die. It was one thing to know that, and something else to feel it. Mortality made most of their failings seem minor, tender, and bearable.
July 17, 2025
written in the 80-90s, the prose style and the dialogue felt bare-bones and simplistic, but some of the details were definitely interesting. some dark themes, presented without pretentiousness, i partially associated the style with radical realism. i don't regret reading it.
December 3, 2024
Bram writes well enough — he has a better-than-average gift for simile — and his greatest technical flaw is an occasional reluctance to shut up his omniscient narrator so that his characters can talk.
Oh, and before I go any farther: a comedy of manners this is most definitely NOT. The notion apparently originated with an ignorant publisher blurb and was subsequently parroted by equally ignorant newspaper writers posing as book reviewers. They could have just as easily — and with at least as much justification — called this a picaresque novel . . . because, as it turns out, it’s highly unclear whether its main character (I hesitate to call him a protagonist) actually learns anything beside how to cut Brie.
A Courbet painting hanging in the Louvre is foil for a cruising scene between 23-year-old Michael and an even younger character who will disappear after this chapter. (By the way, this allows us to date the scene to no later than 1986, the year the painting was transferred to the new Musée d’Orsay.) Which is a shame, because I’d much rather have read about him than Michael. For while we might be inclined to sympathize with anyone who has lost the love of his life to AIDS, Michael is a pretentious snivelly bore. Now it’s possible to put the weight of a novel of even several hundred pages on the shoulders of an unpleasant character, but that character has to be interesting! (Becky Sharp, anyone?) Michael isn’t at all interesting, except perhaps to other self-pitying 23-year-olds.
So anyway, having done the Grand Tour on his dead lover’s dime, Michael returns to the Big Apple to reinsert himself into his dead lover’s circle of friends, wasting no opportunity to remind them that nobody loved or cared for Clarence “Angel Clare” Laird like he did, nobody ever loved as truly or deeply as he did, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Despite his having tricked with some twink at the Louvre, not that anyone has to know about that of course. Not that Angel Clare’s friends are all that fascinating — there’s one couple that seems to do little more than fight and have three-ways — but one immediately sympathizes with their plight: sympathy for the obnoxious little brat’s loss while at the same time looking for ways to get him out of their hair.
Matters improve considerably when Michael goes AWOL — well, strictly speaking, when two of his friends (I’m using the term loosely) go looking for him and we readers get to observe the conflicting feelings of two basically decent people.
As for Michael, he has resolved to commit suicide by slitting his wrists in the bathtub of one of those friends (“That’ll show ‘em/him”). Perilously, as far as the narrative and the reader are concerned, the latter might not be all that bothered if Michael died. Of course I’d be spoiling things if I told you whether he actually went through with it, let alone whether he succeeded, but I will point out that neither possibility can be pulled off successfully, even by a novelist with a talent several times that of Bram’s. I’ll just conclude by saying that Bram gave it his best shot, and that one of his characters hones his talents as a doormat in the process.
If this was indeed the first gay AIDS novel of consequence, I can’t say the subgenre got off to an auspicious start. (I have at least two earlier and admittedly obscure AIDS novels on my shelves: Paul Reed's "Facing it" from 1984 and Jed A. Bryan's "A Cry in the Desert" from 1987.) Larry Kramer, wouldn't you know, beat almost everyone to the punch with his play "The Normal Heart", as did William H. Hoffman with his play "As Is", both from 1985, followed a year later by Bill Sherwood's remarkable film "Parting Glances" — oh, and has anyone noticed how much Bram borrowed from that film? Two-and-a-half stars, curved appropriately.
Oh, and before I go any farther: a comedy of manners this is most definitely NOT. The notion apparently originated with an ignorant publisher blurb and was subsequently parroted by equally ignorant newspaper writers posing as book reviewers. They could have just as easily — and with at least as much justification — called this a picaresque novel . . . because, as it turns out, it’s highly unclear whether its main character (I hesitate to call him a protagonist) actually learns anything beside how to cut Brie.
A Courbet painting hanging in the Louvre is foil for a cruising scene between 23-year-old Michael and an even younger character who will disappear after this chapter. (By the way, this allows us to date the scene to no later than 1986, the year the painting was transferred to the new Musée d’Orsay.) Which is a shame, because I’d much rather have read about him than Michael. For while we might be inclined to sympathize with anyone who has lost the love of his life to AIDS, Michael is a pretentious snivelly bore. Now it’s possible to put the weight of a novel of even several hundred pages on the shoulders of an unpleasant character, but that character has to be interesting! (Becky Sharp, anyone?) Michael isn’t at all interesting, except perhaps to other self-pitying 23-year-olds.
So anyway, having done the Grand Tour on his dead lover’s dime, Michael returns to the Big Apple to reinsert himself into his dead lover’s circle of friends, wasting no opportunity to remind them that nobody loved or cared for Clarence “Angel Clare” Laird like he did, nobody ever loved as truly or deeply as he did, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Despite his having tricked with some twink at the Louvre, not that anyone has to know about that of course. Not that Angel Clare’s friends are all that fascinating — there’s one couple that seems to do little more than fight and have three-ways — but one immediately sympathizes with their plight: sympathy for the obnoxious little brat’s loss while at the same time looking for ways to get him out of their hair.
Matters improve considerably when Michael goes AWOL — well, strictly speaking, when two of his friends (I’m using the term loosely) go looking for him and we readers get to observe the conflicting feelings of two basically decent people.
As for Michael, he has resolved to commit suicide by slitting his wrists in the bathtub of one of those friends (“That’ll show ‘em/him”). Perilously, as far as the narrative and the reader are concerned, the latter might not be all that bothered if Michael died. Of course I’d be spoiling things if I told you whether he actually went through with it, let alone whether he succeeded, but I will point out that neither possibility can be pulled off successfully, even by a novelist with a talent several times that of Bram’s. I’ll just conclude by saying that Bram gave it his best shot, and that one of his characters hones his talents as a doormat in the process.
If this was indeed the first gay AIDS novel of consequence, I can’t say the subgenre got off to an auspicious start. (I have at least two earlier and admittedly obscure AIDS novels on my shelves: Paul Reed's "Facing it" from 1984 and Jed A. Bryan's "A Cry in the Desert" from 1987.) Larry Kramer, wouldn't you know, beat almost everyone to the punch with his play "The Normal Heart", as did William H. Hoffman with his play "As Is", both from 1985, followed a year later by Bill Sherwood's remarkable film "Parting Glances" — oh, and has anyone noticed how much Bram borrowed from that film? Two-and-a-half stars, curved appropriately.
November 23, 2014
I didn't see any comedy, although this book offers an important glimpse into an era that changed the landscape of the gay community. Through Michael, Bram tells the story of a young man wrestling with his stake in the fallout of his now-dead lover.
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