Valley of the Shadow

by Christopher Davis

Andrew, a person with AIDS, here recounts his life, calling it "a story of just one gay man who enjoyed life, who enjoyed being gay, who loved his lover as much as one man can love another, and who will die before he is thirty." The love of his life is Teddy, and their relationship, at turns passionate and turbulent, provides the primary focus of the novel. Together for a couple of years, then separated, they reunite when Teddy develops AIDS. It is not until after Teddy's death that Andrew's AIDS is diagnosed. Andrew's life parallels the evolving gay world around him, from fresh-eyed innocence to joyous abandon to cautious fear to new hope. A well-written, contemporary novel, moving and thought-provoking.

James E. Cook, Dayton & Montgomery Cty. P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Genres: LGBT, Fiction

211 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Reviews

[Carl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think it's the most literary, innovative or challenging novel I've read. I'm not even sure it's really a novel as it feels more like a memoir masquerading as fiction.

Valley of the Shadow (St. Martins Press: 1988) tells the story of Andrew, a privileged young gay man from Greenwich, Connecticut who dies of AIDS at the age of 28 sometime in the mid 1980s in New York City. It is also the story of his love affair with his first real boyfriend, Ted, who is 5 or 6 years older, and who he meets when he a freshman at Columbia University.

Andrew is a little hard to relate to, at least for me: from his early teens on until his illness, he is quite self-confidently beautiful and strong, he is a talented classical piano player and excellent student, he gets laid as much as he wants to and in his mid 20s makes plenty of money as a young investment banker, all seemingly without much effort or comment. Most of the story concerns his sex and love life, and partying in NYC bars and on Fire Island with other gay men, which he seems to have plenty of time for as well. When he comes out to his parents on his first trip back home from college for Thanksgiving, they accept it and give him a big hug, something perhaps unusual in the late 70s, early 80s.

Andrew's writing (and by extension, Davis's), however, is also quite good much of the time, and draws the reader into his experience of the physical world and his fellow humans as one of exquisite beauty made more so by the heartbreak of a life cut short by HIV/AIDS. For example, in remembering an early scene from his childhood, he writes:

"There was a garden beyond the trees ... bordered on one side by a row of weeping willows whose lacy branches undulated slowly in the wind, rustling, where thousands of narcissus and daffodils bloomed in the early spring, followed by bright patches of tulips and then by large stands of irises, ranging in color from the lightest salmon pink to black, and then followed by extravagant bursts of peonies. In the late spring the apple trees seemed to come into blossom all at once and I remember walking under them and looking up through the pink mist into a clear blue sky and I remember the petals floating on the water of the pond and browning and rotting in the grass beneath the trees. Later, in the summer, the trees bristled with tiny hard apples, and the strings of frogs' eggs that had been laid earlier had hatched into swarms of tadpoles that blackened the water's edge and moved in eddies although there was no current. Those summer days, and later, when the sun burned the leaves on the apple trees to a green-red-brown and the apples swelled and darkened, I swam and played, but still I was a child."

And later, as Ted is dying of AIDS:

"As darkness fell that evening thunder rolled in the south, out over the sea, and when Teddy was tired he put his arm around me and we left. We walked to the beach and down to the water without speaking, and while we stood there thunder continued to sound in the distance and lightning danced in the sky and flashed in broad sheets along the horizon."

If, like me, you have a soft spot for lives lived in New England and New York City, as well as gay life in New York in the 1980s, I think you will find this novel an easy, poignant and worthwhile read.

[Virgowriter (Brad Windhauser) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was sort of dreading working through an “AIDS novel,” but this surprised me in a good way. For a story grounded in the horror of this disease, it’s really about a life lived and doesn’t get into the sadness until late in the story (even though it’s there all along in brief comments).

[Jimbo Rizzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great characters, although sometimes you want to shake one or both of them (but that's great writing IMHO). Discovered this author only recently and loved his story collection, The Boys in the Bars. He only wrote two other novels, I believe, Philadelphia (a novelisation of the film with Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks) and Joseph and the Old Man. Happy to say I've hunted them down and have now got both on my shelves to read...

[Lisa Dare-De Vries · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book a surprising amount. Yes, it's sad, but the story is also so joyful and full of love, and the prose made me shiver with pleasure. I recommended it to a friend, who also adored it. Best thing I read this year. The ending left me gasping.

[Karl Kraus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. Yes, there's often little logic to whom one falls in love with (didn't we learn that from Midsummer Night's Dream? or real life?), but a novelist really shouldn't hide behind that excuse, and ought to betray even a little bit of interest in the loved one! Andrew and Teddy have lots of sex and fight a lot . . . and that's about it. It's astonishing how little interested Andrew (or are we now talking Davis?) is in Teddy: We learn nothing, absolutely nothing about his relationship with his family -- or indeed whether he even has one -- until almost at the end when he's dying; needless to say, Andrew's relationship with *his* family (and, for that matter, Teddy's relationship with Andrew's family) is a major theme. Nor are we given any idea why Teddy, who otherwise shows no interest in religion or even spirituality, should know the Christmas story from St. Luke by heart or want the Twenty-third Psalm read for him post mortem. Tellingly, Davis calls it the "St. James version of the Christmas story from Luke," which pretty much indicates his own lack of interest in detail. There's the occasional entirely unmotivated episode such as Andrew's heterosexual affair; if it's supposed to contribute anything to character or plot, Davis leaves us clueless. For that matter, we're never given any clue as to why Andrew was a philosophy major, and his job as an investment banker is about as integral to the story as, say, Chandler's job on *Friends*. One suspects that the novel is largely autobiographical, because fiction is supposed to do more than string things along listlessly and navel-gaze, which is what this novel does. Sadly, not every life, however tragic, is equally illuminating or even interesting. 1.5 stars.