From the Publisher
When John Weir's debut novel, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, was published in the late 1980s, it was immediately recognized by critics across the country as one of the most perceptive, unsentimental, and beautifully written accounts of the political and emotional consequences of AIDS on both individuals and a community. In What I Did Wrong, his long-awaited second novel, Weir has written another powerfully moving-and often disarmingly funny-book about loss, character, and sexuality in the post-AIDS era, a survivor's tale in an age when all the certainties have lost their logic and focus.
The Washington Post -
Dennis Drabelle
Given the superiority of What I Did Wrong to The Irreversible Decline , the recycling of a few tropes seems almost admirable. "Yes, I may not have gotten it right the first time around," Weir seems to be saying, "but let me see if I can't do better now." Indeed he has. What I Did Wrong is a tragicomic reworking of a theme from the earlier book -- the lasting effect of AIDS on surviving friends.
Publishers Weekly
Sixteen years after The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, Weir checks in with a follow-up that sparkles episodically but lacks the narrative drive of its celebrated predecessor. Fortyish novelist and Queens College professor Tom, who survived his 20s and 30s in a New York ravaged by AIDS, encounters a lifetime of demons during one jam-packed day in May 2000. Tom's straight boyhood friend Richie McShane, thinking he may be out of his depth on an Internet-arranged date with a person named Afrodytea, is bringing Tom along to chaperone. As the two navigate the five boroughs, Tom takes stock, pondering the wisdom of falling for his student Justin Innocenzio (a thuggish yet sensitive straight boy from Queens), and rehashing his first two love affairs (with suave older man Mark and street-smart girl Ava) and his early days with Richie. Most of all, though, Tom is haunted by friends lost to AIDS, particularly by the specter of Zack, a noisome, repellent activist from ACT UP days (possibly based on the late novelist David B. Feinberg, author of Eighty-Sixed). Though Weir's prose has humor and grace to spare, a clich ghost adviser and intrusions of lousy student poetry aren't camp enough, and an overly complicated narrative structure creates confusion. (Mar. 27) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Seated in a West Village coffee shop, Tom, a middle-aged gay man who teaches creative writing at Queens College, unexpectedly encounters Richie, the former high school jock who was his best friend as a teenager in New Jersey. Still awestruck by Richie and willing to tag along as his sidekick on a blind date with a mysterious woman, Tom reflects on his life. In the 1970s, Richie's unquestioned masculinity and seemingly endless marijuana supply had compensated for the incessant queer-baiting and occasional beatings that Tom endured, while the 1980s and early 1990s were marked by Tom's grief as his friends succumbed to AIDS. Juxtaposed with these memories is Tom's life at the turn of the millennium, centered on his teaching and a hopelessly one-sided romance with a straight young student. Weir (The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket) molds Tom as a memorable antihero characterized by aimlessness, uncertainty, and his failure to achieve his potential as a writer and as a man. The skillfully developed themes of friendship, sexual identity, and the inability to escape one's past are complemented by a firm sense of place and time. Recommended for gay fiction collections.-Joseph M. Eagan, Enoch Pratt Free Lib, Baltimore Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A gay scholar meditates on a lifetime of losses and humiliations both before and during the age of AIDS. This second novel by Weir (The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, not reviewed) is set during a single day in 2000: Tom, a 40-something community-college English teacher and novelist living in New York, is roped into joining his childhood friend Richie as he meets an Internet acquaintance for a date. This small event provokes a cascade of memories for Tom, most of them deeply melancholic: the sad, slow death of his friend Zack as he succumbed to AIDS, the insults and worse from his classmates and teachers in high school who publicly berated him for being (or at least seeming) gay, his complicated emotional and sexual relationship with his friend Ava. Many of Tom's remembrances are of being a gay man in the '80s, which inevitably makes this novel at least partly an AIDS elegy-as Weir writes, "we didn't have much of a context except illness and death." But despite its title, and despite the fact that Tom is the contemplative and moody sort, this book is never burdened by a somber, self-pitying tone. If anything, Tom's main torment-the crush he has on Justin, a young, handsome and talented student-brings energy and a feeling of optimism to the story. Weir's finest achievement is the way he connects disparate events to create a sort of emotional synthesis-as when a trip to Herman Melville's grave with Justin segues into Zack's final days, and a stop at Richie's apartment gives way to a memory of a high-school beating. Individually, they're just scraps of events; woven together, they become revelatory passages on the wounds each of the characters bear, and on what gives them the strengthto move their lives forward. Familiar themes for a gay novel, but Weir conveys them inventively and effectively.
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