Natal­ie Adler’s Wait­ing on a Friend takes place over the sum­mer of 1984, dur­ing the ear­ly years of the AIDS pan­dem­ic in New York City. The first-per­son nar­ra­tor is Rena­ta, a Low­er East Side native whose armor of care­ful­ly con­struct­ed cyn­i­cism is both but­tressed and bat­tered by the cat­a­stro­phe unfold­ing around her. Rena­ta can see ghosts, and has been see­ing more and more of them since the virus arrived in the city, but the one ghost she tru­ly wants to see does not appear: that of her best friend and room­mate, Mark. Despite years of the kind of friend­ship that tran­scends every bound­ary, Mark’s ill­ness drove a wedge between the two, and Rena­ta missed the moment of his death. 

The nov­el is a ten­der, almost painful explo­ration of what it means to exist on the mar­gins of soci­ety. Renata’s bit­ter­ly fun­ny nar­ra­tive voice tem­pers the dev­as­ta­tion of the events that unfold around her, as the bound­aries between liv­ing and dead are blurred by the advance of the pan­dem­ic. The com­mu­ni­ty of AIDS patients are ren­dered ghost­ly even before death — by the blind ter­ror of those who are well, and by the Rea­gan government’s delib­er­ate down­play­ing of the illness’s hor­rors. What Renata’s ghosts most want is sim­ply to be seen, to have some­one look direct­ly at them and acknowl­edge what they have experienced. 

Her liv­ing friends have the same sim­ple needs: to be seen, to be lis­tened to, to be touched. Adler high­lights the spe­cial cru­el­ty of AIDS as a sick­ness that ren­ders close con­tact dan­ger­ous even as it is com­fort­ing. Much of the action takes place with­in spaces that feel con­fined and inti­mate, even when they should not. Ware­hous­es and open streets, packed with peo­ple, his­to­ry, and the damp weight of New York City sum­mer air, feel as dense as an East Vil­lage apart­ment shi­va turned party. 

With­in this crowd­ed world, Rena­ta has kept one eye closed to just how much she is capa­ble of see­ing, defend­ing her­self by refus­ing to let down her guard com­plete­ly, but the non­ap­pear­ance of Mark’s ghost forces her to begin reach­ing out in ways she has pre­vi­ous­ly avoid­ed. She finds her foil in the Reme­di­a­tors, a kind of orga­ni­za­tion of Ghost­busters, if the Ghost­busters were the dull, bureau­crat­ic oppo­site of action hero­ism. Their job is to clear the ghost­ly ener­gy out of New York’s well-used hous­ing stock, mak­ing the way for gen­tri­fi­ca­tion. Through her inter­ac­tions with the Reme­di­a­tor Sil­ver­man, whose own inter­gen­er­a­tional trau­ma makes him cer­tain that remov­ing New York’s ghosts is the only answer, Rena­ta is able to artic­u­late her refusal to turn aside any longer. While it hurts to look direct­ly at tragedy, Adler and Rena­ta argue, sweep­ing it aside doesn’t make it go away: the ghost­ly ener­gy remains, build­ing pres­sure, more dan­ger­ous than it was before it was contained.