The Brooklyn Rail

Struggling against impermanence is what animates community. The paradox for all of us slogging through the vexingly temporal is that a moment is gone as quickly as it happens. You can always take a picture, but it’s already too late. In his 1998 essay “Fame,” Robert Glück writes that most things about community are either unknowable until they’re gone, “like extended family and leaving the door unlocked,” or newly invented, such as networks of care that arose from the AIDS crisis. “So when communities are eroding or inventing themselves,” he explains, “the structures of personal life become visible.”

Naming and locating these aspects of a community counter the strain of history by revealing the slipperiness of historical conditions. In Charlie Porter’s stunning debut novel Nova Scotia House, the author strips away any excess to closely examine the possibilities of queer love and joy amidst the ongoing AIDS crisis. The result is a brutally direct story about Johnny Grant, who reminisces from the present about his late lover, Jerry, and the disappearing world they once built together. A raw, heart-on-its-sleeve book that wrests a tender love story out of an agonizing scream from the void, Nova Scotia House is an urgent work of remembrance.

As narrator, Johnny trudges through a nameless neoliberal hell he enumerates only through its soulless architecture:

flats and flats piled awkward high, piles of flats precarious blocking the light all around, the flats are like what lowest price eight hundred thousand for what a studio which is basically a cupboard north facing no light out onto nothing … no one in the flats, but the flats remain, like the flats are more important than the people.

Without ever mentioning London by name, he gestures towards the aggravating crisis of isolation in big cities, turning them into empty hulls of concrete.

In the nineties, when Johnny’s nineteen, he meets Jerry, a warm and intuitive forty-five-year-old living with HIV who opens up his life to Johnny, sharing his home and teaching him to garden. Thirty years later and Jerry has died, leaving behind the apartment they shared—Flat 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny continues to tend the same garden, even as a new high rise threatens his sunlight. He feeds the same sourdough starter that Jerry kept: “when I eat the bread I eat the same bread Jerry made,” a means of weaving Jerry’s spirit into the mundane quotidian of Johnny’s life.

One of Nova Scotia House’s many strengths is the supple balancing act that Porter’s writing performs. He finds harmony between dirge and protest song, resonances among manifesto and elegy. Johnny’s self-discovery coincides with Jerry’s shaky acceptance of death and makes legible, as Glück writes, the “structures of personal life” that exist in a state of constant rupture. Porter is measured in his approach, distributing the book’s emotional weight evenly through his use of a nakedly affective, irruptive yet controlled style. Sex scenes land with the same aplomb as the I love yous, like when Johnny writes a postcard to Jerry: “TO MY JERRY — I LOVE YOU — ALWAYS YOURS — JOHN. I’d never written anything like it before. Anything with actual feeling … so began our paper trail.”

Porter’s prose chases a radicality akin to the living experiments Jerry and his friends once made. “The homes we had grown up in were physical manifestations of everything we rejected,” Jerry says, remembering his early queer life of bohemian encampments. “The warehouses gave us the chance to redraw. To redraw the way we lived. Maybe not everybody in the community recognized the importance of what we were doing … we would talk and we would talk about what it meant to be gay and to live.” Like a fiction, a means of splitting from and reimagining towards, not to anywhere in particular, just to circumvent the cold “inside/outside” of contemporary life.

But, as the AIDS crisis continually demonstrates, the borders between personal and political existences are unstable. Policymakers and scientists who stymied the release of life-saving drugs foreclose any alternative futures. Rage takes the shape of protest, as when Johnny, Jerry, and their community stage a demonstration at a medical conference, which Porter conveys with breathless acuity: “They were pulling me I had the lectern they yanked they pulled me to the floor the lectern fell a glass of water smashed security picked me up under the arms I was howling I was screaming JERRY WILL DIE JERRY WILL DIE and they dragged me off.”

Present-day Johnny is caught in the vortex of memory and heartbreak, trying to piece himself back together while stewarding Jerry’s small legacy—the dateless, nameless paintings he made, the small garden he tended: whatever remained, Johnny maintains. He contributes to the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt, photos of which are reproduced in the book. Survival and remembrance are strategies of resistance, measures taken against finality. Activist Ted Kerr says that AIDS is one of the “few things that gets memorialized while it’s still ongoing,” and in 2019 artist Gregg Bordowitz made a banner that reads “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING.” Porter writes Nova Scotia House from the same mode of “crisis ordinariness” that Lauren Berlant once used to describe Bordowitz’s art, resulting in an essential work of anti-nostalgia that graciously honors its subjects.