10/05/2020
Caldwell (In the Shadow of the Bridge ) concocts a parable of commitment and faith, complete with a divine miracle in his evocative and earnest latest. In late 1980s New York City, artist Dempsey Coates meets Staten Island firefighter Johnny Donegan while he’s on a call in Dempsey’s neighborhood. They date for a few months, but drift apart. When they are reunited in 1992, Dempsey has been through a period of drug addiction and has contracted AIDS. She has also benefited from a minor miracle in the form of a large inheritance that allows her to devote herself full-time to her current project, a painting of Lazarus. She eventually asks Johnny to pose for her, and they get engaged. Johnny’s inner turmoil about his Catholicism—the church can’t sanction the couple’s planned marriage because they practice safe sex—leads to a friendship with the empathetic priest, Father Dunphy. Johnny’s prayers for Dempsey to be cured lead to events neither Dunphy nor Dempsey’s doctor can explain. Caldwell vividly evokes a bygone era and an earlier pandemic, while consistently finding complexity and meaning in the characters’ everyday routines. This thoughtful outing marks an affecting turn in Caldwell’s long career. Agent: Caron Knauer, Caron K. Literary. (Dec.)
"Joe Caldwell expertly navigates the sacred depths of romance during a pandemic, and successfully dramatizes poet Dylan Thomas' passionate line that 'love is the last light spoken.'"
"Vividly evokes a bygone era and an earlier pandemic, while consitently finding complexity and meaning in the characters' everyday lives…thoughtful, an affecting turn in Caldwell's long career."
"Lazarus Rising anatomizes devotion in the darkest hour of the AIDS epidemic through two lovers, tragically intimate with illness and death, who heroically embrace the body and its shocking surprises. This daring love that passes understanding finds its ideal medium in the rich yet spare prose of Caldwell's wonder-filled novel."
In the Shadow of the Bridge is an extraordinary memoir in its frankness and simple style, and in its self-denigration, delivered with a wit and warmth most people would be unable to summon or maintain.
WSHU (NPR Connecticut and Long Island)
Intoxicating… an intimate remembrance of gay things past… The book is a powerful testament to solidarity in the city of gay dreams.
The New York Journal of Books
Praise for In the Shadow of the Bridge : "A moving memoir and a look at gay and artistic life in New York City from the 1950s on, through the AIDS epidemic.
Caldwell’s spare memoir recounts a life lived in the shadow of yearning.
Joseph Caldwell’s intimate portrait of gay life in New York City before Stonewall is an important addition to LGBTQ history. Caldwell is a compassionate and accomplished storyteller, and his memoir of a life well and fully lived is a book to treasure.”
Caldwell’s story and his writing are very moving and impactful. You go on a journey with Joseph that traces not only changes in New York but changes in society.
Caldwell shares his account with readers now in hopes that they see humanity. ‘We’re always learning about what it means to be human,’ he says, and In the Shadow of the Bridge is a fine example of exactly that.
In telling the story of coming to NYC as a young man, grappling with his desire to be an artist, to be a man of faith, and his desire for the love of another man, Joseph Caldwell tells the story of a time and place—the story of a generation.
At its core a love story. But this is a love story that is bittersweet as it comes to fruition in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic.”
A charming, brutally candid memoir… a memoir that chronicles the changing tide of artistic and gay life and a New York that no longer exists, as well as an important document of the early, harrowing years of the AIDS epidemic.
In the Shadow of the Bridge is an extraordinary memoir in its frankness and simple style, and in its self-denigration, delivered with a wit and warmth most people would be unable to summon or maintain.
null WSHU (NPR Connecticut and Long Island)
2020-10-27
When Dempsey Coates offers Johnny Donegan a respite from his duties as a New York City firefighter in her Tribeca loft building, the encounter launches the mismatched pair into a complex relationship that’s shadowed by her diagnosis of AIDS, contracted while using intravenous drugs. Johnny, the son of a traditional Irish Catholic family on Staten Island, falls instantly in love with the beautiful, troubled artist, who’s at work on a series of paintings recounting the biblical story of Lazarus, even becoming her model. Their episodic affair becomes more complicated when he encounters the objections of his parish priest, who explains that the need for Johnny to practice safe sex prevents the church from giving its blessing should they wed, and Dempsey’s medical condition takes an unusual turn after Johnny, in a fit of desperation at his faith’s intransigence, allows himself to pray for a cure. Caldwell, a playwright and memoirist, impressively tackles consequential themes like the power of belief, miracles, and the oppressive weight of guilt, but he’s overly fond of descriptive prose that, for all its facility, too often serves to subordinate these themes and the plot itself to unnecessary digressions. In its concluding chapters, the novel becomes darker as Dempsey, a fierce atheist, and the almost saintlike Johnny, who is credited with rescuing two people from burning buildings, grapple with the unforeseen directions in which fate has guided their lives. When each, in a radically different way, chooses to respond to the lessons gleaned from their experience, their decisions seem jarring rather than earned, leaving behind an aftertaste of unfairness in place of the inevitability that’s the stuff of great tragic drama.
An enigmatic love story set at the height of the AIDS pandemic.
