SOURCE: "The Music for a Closing: Responses to AIDS in Three American Novels," in AIDS: The Literary Response, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 23-38.

[In the following essay, Dewey examines three novels that he considers exemplary literary representations of the realities surrounding AIDS.]

The American experience has produced remarkably few journals of plague years. After all, our most direct confrontations with the realities of epidemic infection occurred early in our nation's history, long before a tradition in fiction had begun; encouraged by loosely monitored sanitary conditions, chronic food shortages, impure water supplies, and hordes of insects, "epidemic disorders [regular outbreaks of malaria, smallpox, typhoid, and scarlet fever] visited death and destruction upon the American colonies with relentless regularity." Yet with the exception of Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799) with its dark vision of a Philadelphia ravaged by the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 the early colonial experience with pestilence found little voice in our national literature. Plagues in our literature have been neither bacterial nor viral but rather moral and, hence, metaphoric: our plagues have been rapacity, complacency, racism, political fanaticism, sexual excesses, drug and alcohol abuse. These have been our sicknesses, simpler to diagnose than to treat; and writers as diverse as Jack London and Thomas Pynchon, William Dean Howells and James Baldwin, Henry James and Kurt Vonnegut have created our journals of these plagues. Indeed, despite Arthur Mervyn's unblinking record of the horrific realities of Philadelphia's crowded hospitals and stinking streets, Brown uses the epidemic metaphorically to suggest the moral malignancy his young hero must ultimately come to glimpse as a necessary moment in his maturation.

In America, the record of our confrontations with epidemics has been recorded not in our fiction but in medical treatises. There, in its largely inaccessible language, the medical community has first defined, then isolated, and (with reassuring regularity) vanquished one after another of a score of once terrifying diseases: encephalitis, influenza, smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, tuberculosis, and, most recently, polio. Never in America's history has plague commanded the terror or immediacy that has been recorded in other national literatures. Indeed, from Cotton Mather's courageous campaign to inoculate a decidedly hostile Boston against smallpox to Noah Webster's encyclopedic A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases (1799) to the heroics of Walter Reed and Jonas Salk, the American experience with pestilence has been a defiant record of success. A scant decade ago the notion that we might confront a plague—more, a strain of virus never tracked—would have seemed the alarmist premise of bargain-bin science fiction. Yet the devastating potency of the HIV virus, with its dubious distinction as the first plague of the Television Age, has created within a half-decade after its outbreak not only a global awareness of a radically new sort of infection but also for the first time in the American literary experience a substantial body of what must be defined as plague literature.

An artistic response was, perhaps, inevitable given that the HIV virus has struck with particular virulence within the arts community, generating responses in virtually every media. The literary response, largely ignored by the reading public and the established critics in the popular press, chronicles our attempt to come to terms with difficult conditions that have carried us back to a decidedly medieval sort of mind-set. After all, at the decade's start, we sat securely within the smooth walls of our biomedical wonderland only to turn, like Poe's haughty Prince Prospero, to confront an untreatable retrovirus, with a terrifying sort of memory, that slumbers until, after stretches of years, it begins the steady work of destroying the body's fragile defenses against illness, and is so potent that divine wrath becomes a possible explanation for those struggling to answer why.

As a genre, this body of plague literature, of course, has little promise—there is no aesthetic beauty in the cavedin, yellowed faces and skeletal figures in AIDS hospices; a viral infection of this scale creates not the elegant individuality of heroes but rather an overwhelming anonymity of victims, interred within statistics; the plot must operate without the drive of suspense, propelled only by the grind of inevitability; there can be no moral—save that a virus blindly, stupidly destroys what gives it life. And because the epidemic stays immediate and vivid in the oppressive tonnage of newspaper articles, magazine photostories, and television documentaries, it resists the graceful transmutation into metaphor that has long been the aesthetic privilege of those writers who dare to work within the dark sphere of illnesses that destroy the young.

More distressing, plague literature is a body of fiction that must recognize as its first premise its own helplessness. For those who are afflicted, the written word cannot heal, cannot answer why, cannot even concoct an afterlife sufficiently believable to overcome the agony of losing this life. Where, then, can an AIDS fiction begin? Given the alarming novelty of the virus itself, traditional models of plague literature—namely, Boccaccio's Decameron, Defoe's The Journal of the Plague Year, and Camus's The Plague—offer few relevant strategies. The bawdy insouciance of Boccaccio's storytelling with its strategic withdrawal from the plague city to refuge deep within the Italian countryside would seem glaringly insensitive—AIDS is too much with us to permit our indulging in, even with yearning innocence, the casual comedy of whiling away the darkest hours in such pleasant nullity. We cannot not write about it. And Defoe's unshakeable conviction that Providence alone could withstand the plague's cold illogic seems at best shopworn in the Secular City where God casts a thin shadow and at worst bald hypocrisy in the face of a disease many can accept as an instrument of divine punishment. And Camus's use of contagion as an undeniable occasion of mortality that tests whether those quarantined in the Algerian port can find significance in life within an infected geography seems too metaphoric, a luxury when compared to what AIDS victims must confront: the indignities of a slow and grinding premature death.

If the genre of plague literature seems inappropriate, so also does the genre of doomed youth. Predominantly war fiction, the literature of doomed youth is a genre of extremes. In its more elegant expression, the genre articulates a heady sort of idealism that defines the sacrifice of young life using a community vocabulary of heightened patriotism. It is a fiction that sustains a community at war and endows the war dead with significance. In this century, however, the fiction more often deals head-on with war's horrific experience to devastate inflated notions of heroism. In either case, war fiction searches for ways to teach the community, to awaken it to awareness. Although the parallel between the at-risk group confronting the HIV virus and doomed, frontline troops has been elaborated by writers (most prominently by Emmanel Dreuilhe in Mortal Embrace), the fiction of the AIDS epidemic cannot find its way to either extreme of the genre, to exaggerated idealism or to unsettling anger. The sick die for no ideal; anger here cannot teach. AIDS fiction, like war fiction, is left only the cold business of measuring the attrition, counting the dead.

There are few other genres into which the literature of AIDS could fall. There is the slender group of works that treats the death of the young, characters confronting mortality precisely at the moment of their fullest potential, confronting, as it were, the lie of youth's own assumptions. Such fiction—James's The Wings of a Dove, for example—often converts the illness into a dramatic metaphor, making the physical trauma of the disease vague, allowing the young sufferer to leap effortlessly into infinity, leaving behind the weightless advice to live fully. It is a literature that counsels with passionate seriousness to love the fragment of time we are given; in such literature the illness is awkwardly irrelevant—the fact of death is central, not the circumstances of dying. Such characters often die of plot necessity. But AIDS is far too immediate, far too available; from the thick rhetoric of government reports to the shrill white noise of supermarket tabloids, the devastation of AIDS is far too immediate to permit such elegant transmutations.

The magnitude of the illness, the steadily escalating statistical projection of the number of infected people, threatens to turn fiction finally into irrelevancy—leaving AIDS fiction to spin with linguistic opulence the elegies or flowery saintly-buddy pieces; with hope impossible to locate, the only available strategy for AIDS fiction, then, would be adjusting to the illogical intervention of the AIDS virus. Or perhaps, as Andrew Holleran argues, the only writing sufficient to the surreal horrors of the epidemic would be a simple list of the names of those who have died, a list that stretches to disheartening lengths as each month 3,000 new cases of AIDS are diagnosed in the United States alone. Ironically, that necessary realism has moved the literature away from death, or more particularly away from recounting the raw experience of preparing for death's interrupting stroke. The fictional response to the fact of AIDS has turned toward the very face of the epidemic and there it has found a strategy, an approach. Although it is surely possible, given the medical community's unprecedented interest in the AIDS virus, that within a generation the infection may go the way of other pestilent horrors, the irruption of the virus has nevertheless generated a substantial body of human and humane fiction, journals of our plague years, the first generation of such novels in the American experience.

I

Doesn't it seem as if autumn were the real
   creator, more creative
than spring, which all at once is; more creative,
   when it comes
with its will to change and destroys the much-
   too-finished,
much-too-satisfied picture of summer?
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Because of its radical failure of nerve, Alice Hoffman's At Risk (1988) is a most instructive starting point in assessing the novel's response to the AIDS epidemic. In Hoffman's novel the settled calm of an affluent family in a small New England town is upended when the 11-year-old daughter, Amanda, is diagnosed with AIDS five years after she has been contaminated by a blood transfusion during an emergency appendectomy. As the family struggles to understand the implications of the diagnosis, Amanda herself adjusts both on a public level (to the casual cruelties of friends and neighbors who, in their ignorance, initially recoil from her) and on a private level (to the reality of her denied future). As she moves uncertainly between planning for a gymnastics competition scheduled for an all-too-distant springtime and imagining what sound her death will make and what color it will be, she strikes poignant responses within the reader. With Dickensian sensibility, Hoffman stage-manages Amanda's narrative. Unlike the mainstream victims of the disease, Amanda, by virtue of her age and the method by which she contracted the virus, can be accepted unambiguously by the reader as a victim. Thus Hoffman manages to elicit sentiment while neatly avoiding the tangling complexity of questions AIDS raises about love, sexuality, and death.

With Hoffman's book, however, we can enter easily into an emotional melodrama in which AIDS serves as well as any contagious, terminal infection. We are free to feel the anger and the sorrow of such an illogical stroke—Amanda is innocence intolerably violated. As such the book succeeds in recording the raw and immediate moments of Amanda's adjustment: weeks after her diagnosis, for example, Amanda, her braces newly removed, peeks into the dentist's mirror and concedes with tears that, indeed, she "would have been beautiful." She is a victim, "murdered," according to her father's passionate anger. The domestic security of Amanda's family is breached much like when the wasp (pregnant, full of eggs) invades the kitchen in the opening scene or when the destructive voles rummage beneath the neat perimeter of the family vegetable garden. AIDS here is an invasion. Instead of confronting AIDS, Hoffman manipulates its impact as a hot buzzword. Forsaking the tensions caused by AIDS on the margins of society to register the impact within the settled middle, Hoffman sanitizes the epidemic, makes its reader-friendly. Not surprisingly, her book received enormous critical attention and significant sales, including movie rights.

But without exploring the effects the virus registers in those whose very identities—sexual, social, political—have been threatened, the book reads as an uncomplicated exercise in the literature of doomed youth. As in such fiction, Hoffman's characters define a natural world irredeemably infected, moving irresistibly toward exhaustion or extinction. At every turn, virtually with every character, we find a death-soaked natural world. Amanda is herself a school champion gymnast, whose stunning routines are the very embodiment of the physical world elevated to grace and near perfection. Amanda's father, an astronomer, specializes in tracking exploding stars, in "looking at dead stars." Her brother is enthralled by dinosaurs. Once his sister is diagnosed, he is trapped within terrifying nightmares in which he imagines extinction creeping over a newborn dinosaur caught in the inexorable slide toward the Ice Age. Amanda's mother, a free-lance photographer, has just completed work on a book about coping with dying and is now covering the seances of a local medium. That medium, who comes to befriend Amanda, is herself haunted by dreams of death because many of her clients are mourning the loss of a loved one and hunger to touch a realm beyond the reach of death.

Yet, Hoffman concedes that the attempt to make contact with the dead is little more than a brave gesture, much like Amanda's brother's naive campaign to capture on film a prehistoric giant turtle he is certain he has glimpsed in a neighborhood pond. Confirming the prehistoric turtle's existence would, of course, counter the physical world's apparent rush toward extinction. However, since the novel is locked within the iron logic of the literature of doomed youth, death claims Amanda, in this instance, melodramatically: before leaving for the hospital, she dictates her "will," consigning her few possessions to her family, struggling to give even as the illness takes everything; then her father carries her to the hospital amid a swirl of dead leaves on Halloween night. It is an uneasy moment of unearned sentimentality, as emotionally draining as it is effortlessly cinematic. When the novel closes with Amanda's brother patiently waiting pondside for the emergence of the prehistoric turtle, after he has received news that his sister is dead, the reader recognizes it as a bravura gesture and, in its own way, an act of denial. Hoffman's novel is, then, an exercise in relearning the terrifying brevity of life, whether it is measured in the handful of summers Amanda has had or in the unnerving stretches of astral years her father measures in his planetarium.

At Risk is, finally, not about Amanda or about AIDS at all. The virus seems less the subject than an occasion to test a family's resilience. Amanda's family first splinters (after the diagnosis, each family member retreats into separate rooms on different levels in the house) and then slowly, gradually repairs. The mother overcomes her awkward relationship with Amanda by watching the friendship that develops between her daughter and the local medium; the father struggles to forgive the random virulence of the natural world through the calming voice of Brian, an AIDS patient who answers questions at an emergency hotline; and the brother overcomes his all too normal sibling grudges against his older sister and affirms in the closing pages that he will never not have a sister. Stricken, the family struggles to heal in the limited time it has before Amanda's generous presence becomes sheerest absence. Hoffman's chosen vehicle for recovery—the family—is, oddly, the very unit of social support that often is inaccessible to the homosexual community. For gays creating a family, of course, is barred by biology; establishing a family is severely restricted by social webbing; and even retaining the family into which they were born is often jeopardized by the revelation of their sexual orientation and then by the devastating revelation of the infection. Hoffman's resolution of the crisis caused by AIDS that is dramatized in her novel does not ring altogether false—Amanda's hesitant movement toward death is all too immediate—but Hoffman cannot find her way to a satisfying examination of AIDS because she deliberately does not focus on the isolation and anxieties the disease has prompted within the gay community. Amanda's death is unbearably poignant but finally reductive. And because Hoffman steers clear of exploring the contrapuntal urges of love and death that a complete literary treatment of AIDS demands, her narrative can offer not hope but only adjustment. Hoffman's narrative is, finally, unpleasantly exploitative as it summons the images of the epidemic without grappling with its essential definition. As such, Hoffman's work remains at best a powerful reassertion of that leaden feeling (typical in the literature of doomed youth) that a young character has been robbed of the opportunity to experience what life has to offer.

Unlike Hoffman's elaborate dodge, Robert Ferro's Second Son (1988) directly confronts mortality as well as the more complicated questions of love and sexuality raised by the AIDS epidemic. And, offering characters compelled by such urgencies, Ferro is able to create a very dramatic journal of this plague, offering in his work what Hoffman cannot—a model for those who seek in literature not a cure but rather a strategy for coexisting with a virus of compelling potency.

Ferro centers his argument on the striking comparisons between the traditional family and the gay relationship, or more exactly between the social unit applicable to measuring the stability of presumably healthy heterosexual arrangements and the less conventional partnerships struck when sexual orientation excludes expression within such conventional lines. Against the fashionable stereotype of the homosexual life-style of the 1970s when the gay community found in limitless promiscuity a defiant assertion of identity, Ferro here traces a nurturing relationship that develops between Mark Valerian and Bill Mackey, both stricken with the virus.

That construction, so apparently defined by the AIDS epidemic as infected, offers within Ferro's book the possibility of healing against the family, which here is so completely dysfunctional, so totally bankrupt of reassuring support and compassion that it, rather than the relationship defined as diseased, is ailing and terminally infected.

The novel opens with Ferro's devastating portrait of Mark Valerian's family. Although Mark often jokingly refers to the "Filial Wars" that have long wrenched his family, such posturing conceals what is indeed a family deeply divided, a busy family involved in exacting professions (one sister is named Vita). Given the fury of their upscale life-styles, they express familial affection in frictionless holiday gestures and in quick long-distance telephone calls. Mark cannot find his place within this family. Unlike two of his siblings, one a psychologist, the other a lawyer, Mark follows an aesthetic impulse—his eye for "form, decoration"—and has become an interior decorator. His other sister expounds on the wisdom of abandoning the fast track to raise a family, a life-style even further removed from Mark. Mark's diagnosis only reinforces his sense of estrangement, his feeling of being (as the title underscores) one son too many. The family initially recoils from Mark's illness, finding the diagnosis distasteful, dangerous. His father, trying to define the illness within a fundamentalist Christian vocabulary, waffles between repugnance over the "sin" of homosexuality and the lamest clichés of his faith in miracles. But he cannot conceal that he finds the illness and, by extension, his second son, offensive.

Isolated, Mark takes up residence for the summer in the cavernous run-down summer cottage that the family has maintained for nearly 30 years by Cape May, New Jersey. When the family, encouraged by the reptilian older brother, moves to sell the summer cottage to help cover enormous losses incurred by the father's failing business, it is a practical decision uncomplicated by compassion. The inevitable showdown between father and second son over the sale of the house is an ugly recitation not merely of deep-seated homophobia but the far more distressing feelings in the son that his father is waiting for him to die, to be rid of the cumbersome problem of the second son. It is an "annihilating moment" that leaves nothing but "ash." The family with its occasional gestures toward connection (in a tender moment, Mark is allowed to hold his niece) is a decaying construction, like the summer cottage itself. Itself more dead than alive, it cannot minister to the dying second son.

The radical failure of the Valerian family to accommodate the life of the second son defines what has emerged as the dominant theme of the literary response to AIDS—the terrifyingly simple sundering of hearts, the ease with which distance is created. In many ways, the virus and its attendant paranoias have legitimized disconnection. In the government's sobering pronouncements for safe sex, in the hysterical calls for quarantining or tattooing the sick, in the necessities of barrier nursing, in the designation of the sick as pariah, we are shaped by a logic of withdrawal. Apart from the pragmatics of health care, disconnection is part of a larger conspiracy of apathy, a determination by the largest share of the population currently enjoying the illusion of being not at risk to turn away from the flat, dead eyes of the already stricken. It is "their" disease—and unlike other diseases that emerged into prominence during the decade (Alzheimer's, for example) AIDS is perceived to be an affliction that will not cross the threshold if it is not given access. Far more terrifying than the grinding physical erosion of the disease on its victims, Ferro argues, is the fear of being abandoned. Twice marginalized, once by their sexual identity and then again by their infection, surrounded in their community by those who have learned hard lessons of repugnance, estranged from family, even from lovers, and left often with only the cold touch of sympathetic strangers in hospices, AIDS patients too often are left to play at desperate illusions of self-sufficiency. When Mark visits Bill in the hospital, he visits an AIDS patient very much alone, a boy of 23 whose only company, he groans, is death: "I feel it come into the room." Left so finally alone, he confesses to Mark that death would be better than the insufferable days of isolation. His only consolation, his heart so thoroughly destroyed, is that death will finally claim everyone. He lashes out at Mark, "Your lover will die, then you will; then all of them, one after another."

Second Son cites just this irrevocable error of withdrawing into the self and counsels rather a courageous commitment to emotion—the fragile, private, man-made constructions of passion and compassion, that can serve as a heroic counterforce to the sort of poisonous webbing suggested by the insidious spread of the disease. Against the very public campaigns encouraging discipline, celibacy, and abstinence, against the withering away of the urgent, creative combustion of sexual spontaneity, against the acceptance in the gay community to live like Shakers—against, in short, a decade-long drift away from each other, Ferro asserts a most unconventional response—the relationship. Against the collapse of Mark's family, we witness the emergence in graceful counterpoint of his relationship with Bill Mackey, a set designer and theatrical lighting specialist whom he meets while on a working vacation in Rome. Like Mark, Bill has tested positive and begins even as the relationship develops to feel the first symptoms. Yet this relationship defies the grinding inevitability of the virus. When they first make love in Rome under the fabulous vermilion sunsets spoked into color by the poisonous radiation cloud from Chernobyl as it passes over southern Europe, Mark and Bill construct a marvelously fragile bond that revives for both of them emotional responses denied in the two years since their diagnoses, two years of living on the rich details of their memories.

As Mark and Bill make love—the "collected, considerate reserve of elderly lovers who worry for each other's hearts or brittle bones"—it is a potent sort of magic. During the slow, late summer days when Mark and Bill return from Rome to the Berkshires to disperse the ashes of Bill's longtime companion, Mark rows to the middle of a lake one evening on Bill's instructions. He turns toward the distant haze of the shore and in the fading twilight sees flickering against the descending dusk on shore a fabulous "necklace of lights" "bleeding into the darkness," complemented by 60-foot jet streams of water arching into the simple grace of a rainbow. It is a gift from Bill. Mark is enthralled by such a lambent moment of magic that speaks a "language of brightness," all produced by Bill's creative impulse, aided by a noiseless generator, a pump, and miles of extension cords. Like the fragile connection forged between Bill and Mark, the display is not permanent; rather it can be maintained for only a gorgeous moment. But Bill's gesture suggests the magic of the artificial, the man-made, that is powerful precisely because it must flicker, because it must certainly give way to the darkness. Their emotional bond is an assertion against the natural world—that world is represented by the Roman sunsets infected by radiation or by the shoreline hushing into night or by the AIDS infection. The natural, here as in other fictional responses to AIDS, is decidedly limited; the retrovirus strikes, as Susan Sontag has observed, through the blood and semen, the most sacramental networks of biological life. Against the autumn shoreline that moves with its natural determination toward the silences of winter, the fragile string of lights enchants Mark; indeed, it glows stronger, brighter as night descends. And under the tonic of their commitment to each other, Mark and Bill register defiant remission in their illness—lesions fade, headaches dim, appetites return. Theirs becomes a marvelous parable of restoration and reclamation, as Mark's profession might suggest.

But AIDS cannot permit magic. Despite Mark's emotional description of Bill as some fantastic being "lowered from the sky on piano wire" and his heady pronouncements that he simply will not concede to the disease, he cannot shake dreams of boarding a train bound for a "cathedrallike, cavernous nineteenth-century railway station of steel and glass," a haunting suggestion of approaching death. The fiction of AIDS cannot depend on recovery—the disease demands closure. Ferro will not abrogate the imperative of realism. Against a subplot that involves an exchange of letters in which a friend of Mark's (who is likewise infected as the reader gathers from remarks in the letters) writes about the money he is investing in a ludicrous plan to launch a rocketful of homosexuals to a distant planet there to recover and live in peace, Mark shoulders his way toward what must be. Toward the end of the book, the relapse for both Mark and Bill signals that indeed they are poised to acknowledge the end of any new possibilities even as Mark returns to close up Cape May for the winter. There is no cure—simply the steady assurances they offer each other that neither will go it alone.

Ferro argues that such an assurance is the sole gesture against the plague. In a poignant moment, Mark, in the hospital for tests, must deliver a sperm sample and finds himself unable to achieve sufficient erection. He begins to cry, and only in tears does he find himself aroused. That is the lesson of Second Son—only the steady pressure of absolute absence engenders absolute emotion. Much as Mark watches a handsome man walk slowly along the beach weaving tight circles above the wastes of the sand with a metal detector to find something of value, Ferro finds within the claustrophobic binding of the disease something of value—the overwhelming magnitude of a disease that defies connection demands connection, not in the heady excesses of cruising but in the gentler gesture of finding another heart. As Mark watches the man on the beach find something, the metal scoop he carries proves "inadequate. Only the human hand will do." Unlike Hoffman's sentimental drama, resolution cannot be found within the constricting webbing of the family. As Mark and Bill prepare, as AIDS patients must, for inevitable closure, they wait with each other. That commitment offers them a healing of a sort, a summer that is in its brevity the very mother of beauty. The disease itself creates the occasion of their passion, for only the knowledge of their mutual infection creates the courage to love. Unable to place sufficient faith in the interminable experiments with blood tests and new drugs, unable to believe as an Italian clairvoyant assures them that the passing radiation cloud will cure them, Mark and Bill define a fragile community, an achievement of manmade magic as artificial, as momentary, as incandescent as the string of lights along an autumnal shoreline.

III

The Sunrise—Sir—compelleth Me—
Because He's Sunrise—and I see
—Emily Dickinson, "Poem 480"

George Whitmore's Nebraska (1987) would seem to be an odd choice as the most significant journal of our plague years. Whitmore's narrative does not directly treat the virus. Moving from the Eisenhower fifties to the summer of 1969, the very threshold of the sexual liberation of the 1970s, Whitmore's novel traces the difficult maturation of Craig McMullen, a fatherless, one-legged boy who must come to terms with his homosexuality even as his family is devastated by similar revelations about his Uncle Wayne, whom Craig fiercely admires as a surrogate father. Well within the conventions of gay literature, Whitmore centers his coming-of-age story on the difficulty of the double life, or more accurately, the fractured life necessitated by a social network unable to accept sexuality that cannot be contained within the simplest perception of "normal."

One such fractured life is surely Uncle Wayne's. Following his discharge from the navy, he returns to Nebraska to await word from Vernon, a friend from the navy, about opening a garage in California. Wayne is a man of the world, too big, too full of life to be trapped within the iron frame of Nebraska. The engagement ring he wears on his pinkie, he brags, is a token of affection from any one of a number of women who waited for him at any number of ports. Yet, he stays in Nebraska. Each letter he receives from Vernon delays his plans, he says, because of financial inconveniences. Reluctantly, Wayne accepts work, temporarily, he insists.

But Wayne is leading a fiercely destructive secret life. Because Whitmore relates events through the limited perception of a young Craig, we do not learn until much later the actual contents of the letters from Vernon to Wayne. In them, Vernon must tell Wayne that their love cannot be realized and that separation is the only response. Driven by the oppressive confines of a Nebraska home he suddenly cannot leave and by the realization that the simplest expression of his love would not be tolerated, Wayne makes uncertain gestures toward his impressionable nephew; for example, one evening he strokes Craig's penis, checking, he says, for hair. Wayne conceals his sexual identity from his family until he is arrested in a vice sweep of a men's room in a bus depot in nearby Omaha. Then, in quick succession, he loses his job, his family, his home. Without explanation to the young Craig, his Uncle Wayne is simply "gone."

What triggers the sequence of devastating events, not surprisingly, is a lie. Craig concocts an innocent lie about his Uncle Wayne during a sleepover. That night, a sultry Indian summer night, Craig feels good, close to Wesley in ways he does not possess sufficient vocabulary to explain. As they lie together in an improvised tent, a blanket pitched above Craig's bed, Wesley nervously asks to touch the stump of Craig's leg. Finding himself aroused, Craig intrigues to convince his friend to masturbate him by telling him that his Uncle Wayne had bragged that such practices were routine in the navy and that Uncle Wayne had even shown him how to do it "lots and lots of times." It is a devastatingly obvious lie, told without thought during the onset of a hurricane of emotions that the boy at 13 cannot begin to understand. All he wants, he thinks, is to feel his friend's hand warm on his penis, a gesture of the simplest connection that echoes, ironically, the imperative wailed out to him when he watches a television evangelist, who wheezes enthusiastically, "SEIZE LIFE! TAKE LIFE IN THY HANDS! SMELL OF ITS FRAGRANCE." Here, the opportunity is frustrated Wesley, a practicing Baptist, fears such acts are too sinful.

The chain reaction caused by this lie, however, culminates in Craig's testifying after his uncle's arrest. When Wesley's father informs local authorities after Wayne's arrest of what Craig revealed to Wesley, Craig must answer delicately phrased questions about whether his uncle "interfered" with him. When asked if his uncle ever touched him, Craig must admit, of course, that he had—even in the caring gesture of sponge bathing him after the accident that claims his leg. Whitmore offers pages of court testimony that deliver with cold objectivity the devastating judgment against Uncle Wayne. Cornered into testifying against his uncle, the boy, however, only completes the destruction of his uncle begun long before by the systematic refusal of the social webbing to allow him the expression of a normal life, lived as he wanted, as he had to. Destroyed by his trial, ostracized by his family, driven through a series of dead-end jobs, long separated from the companionship of his lover in California, Wayne ends up in a state medical facility where, we find out years later, he is surgically altered against his will, neutralizing what most distresses him but what most defines him—his sexual identity.

When Craig, 10 years later, finally reunites with his uncle in California, he finds a most disturbing creature. Craig first sees Wayne sprawled in four inches of water in a child's wading pool. His uncle does not seem to recognize him. Indeed, now surgically separated from his own sexuality, Wayne lives with Vernon like a child in undisturbed prepuberty. He lives in the room of a "normal" American boy—model airplanes suspended from the ceiling, sports equipment scattered about, pictures of dinosaurs, spaceman wallpaper, sheets and pillow cases with planets. But the normal assumes surreal shadings as Whitmore delivers in a spare and unemotional line of prose the horror of Craig's growing sexual realization. Lost now within the pleasant routines of going to the zoo or to the mall, now giddy in a shrill prepubescent way about sex (he giggles hysterically as he rummages through Vernon's hidden collection of male muscle magazines), Wayne is a shadow of his earlier, tormented self (indeed, in the navy his nickname had been Shadow). Distanced now from the difficult, destructive confrontation with growing up, he lives in a haunting parody of normality, in an eerie sort of suspended animation; he has become a disturbing cross between Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty. But peace has come at a high cost. Craig observes as Wayne and Vernon watch television each night, Wayne cuddled in asexual security in the crook of Vernon's arm. They are unable now to break through to the genuine expression of passion they had shared in the navy. Vernon, feeling enormously responsible for Wayne's condition because of his hasty letters releasing Wayne from their commitment, understands that now they are each other's life sentences … the authentic expression of their passion has been replaced by the colder routine of careful watching. Wayne has vanished into a secret and safe world, like his miniature railroad town in the basement that he shows his nephew, with its miles of tracks, its detailed landscaping, its houses and farms, precise down to stray sheep, streetlights, and picket fences—so compellingly normal, so unnervingly surreal.

Whitmore's narrative, then, would seem a most disturbing variation on the doomed-queen genre, a revelation of the agonies experienced within the closet and the perilous experiences outside its protective darkness. But it is the destructive splintering within the boy that more concerns Whitmore. Uncertain of his sexuality, uncertain of its potency, its acceptability, even its implications, Craig moves through a difficult adolescence unloved. There are no happy couples within Craig's immediate experience. Craig's father, a reformed alcoholic, returns to his son's life quite abruptly after school one afternoon, years after abandoning his family. Despite his fervent declamations about being a born-again Christian, he is, nevertheless, capable of kidnapping his son during the height of a Nebraska snowstorm. When it is apparent the boy is more fearful than forgiving, the father douses the child with gasoline and contemplates sacrificing him to God, Isaac-style, to make up for his past mistakes. And Craig's long-suffering mother is bloated by a life of servility, first to the raging abuses of her husband and then to the petty slavery of her 15 years waiting tables at a Montgomery Ward's coffee shop. She recalls with imperfect emotions the unanticipated pregnancy that led her, years earlier, to begin the elaborate charade as mother. Other marriages in Craig's family are drawn by financial considerations or are brokered after similar unexpected pregnancies; they are sustained by the merest gestures of interest; siblings are horribly distant and casually cruel, grandparents inexplicably hostile and obscure.

It is struggling, finally, against that dead weight of oppression, corroded passion, and deception that marks the emergence of Craig McMullen. Crippled at 12 (on the very threshold of puberty) by a vicious truck accident that forces the amputation of his leg, Craig is forever isolated, marked, denied access to the normal expression of boyhood—Red Cross swimming lessons and scouting, for example. Indeed, normality seems a condition far removed from Craig's experience. He is marked by an aberrant father, an infamous uncle, a missing leg. He hungers to be happy, a condition he defines early on as being normal; yet he struggles against the distance, the sheer inaccessibility of such a condition. He dreams of the heartbreakingly simple, of having "his own blue notebook back with the three-hole paper with the ship flags on it and inside the right number of pencils, a little sharpener for the one you lost, your three-color ballpoint and the pink eraser that works on ink too." He cannot, however, seem to make it all work. He admits to an intolerable, inexplicable weight of unhappiness, comparing himself to a young girl in the hospital who had lived her entire, short life in terrible pain assuming all the time, "This is just life." She dies, Craig overhears, from a tumor no doctor had even suspected she had.

Marked by his accident, confused by the uncertain expression of urges he cannot dismiss, Craig cannot find his niche within his corroded family in Nebraska. After his uncle's trial, his mother remarries (to a lugubrious lawyer with colorless eyes who maneuvers an out-of-court settlement after Craig's accident). No offer is extended to Craig to live with them. He goes, rather, to live with his grandparents in their run-down home. There he feels like another piece of the family junk furniture that crowds the house. When, finally, he heads to California to reestablish ties with Wayne, he goes as much in search of himself as his uncle. As his accident suggests, a piece of him is missing—he is incomplete, splintered. Departing Nebraska marks Craig's first significant gesture toward restoring his splintered interior toward authentic feeling. Indeed, in the months after the accident, Craig's mother had been accused by concerned doctors of overdosing the boy with painkillers, which leave him like jelly, rather than working him through the first rehabilitation exercises.

The reunion with the shattered remnant of his Uncle Wayne signals Craig's movement toward wholeness, toward emotion, toward his significant split with the charade of being "normal." The undeniable evidence of his uncle's condition at first drives him to run away wildly (like a "poor cartoon creature with his tail on fire"). He ends up in the night world of a Tijuana topless bar where he loses his virginity in an unspectacular tussle with a badly scarred whore (named, ironically, Candy), whom he imagines likes him. To his astonishment in the morning he is asked to pay for her services. His traumatic introduction into the world of heterosexuality is on par with his experiences of the world of his childhood—love defined by the carnal, compelled by the mercenary. Yet against such exploitation and corruption of passion, Craig offers a loving gentler expression—he kisses Candy's heavy network of white scars, the mole she fears is cancerous, the lacerations on her feet from stepping on a nail, the lines on her forehead from a car accident, the jagged line from her appendectomy. Such gentleness, of course, is lost on the prostitute, who scolds him harshly, contemptuously dismisses his efforts at making love, and punches him fiercely.

Finding that expression comes only in the closing sequence when Craig accepts finally that he must love whom he must. Returning to Wayne's house, he stretches out next to his uncle, who is sleeping on the living room couch. At first, Craig wonders if masturbating Uncle Wayne might break the spell his uncle seems to wander in, much as the kiss returned Sleeping Beauty. But, even as Craig places Uncle Wayne's open hand on his stomach, the reader realizes that what may be a gesture too late for the uncle promises awakening for the young Craig. For Craig is the Sleeping Beauty who must be awakened. And as Craig cradles Wayne's hand, he wonders, "God what if this makes me one too? … but what if I am after all." It is a moment of interior confrontation, of measuring the schism within. He pulls closer to the slumbering Wayne, and "for long moments, there is no line between [them]." Craig moves gently to place Wayne's hand "down there," on his penis that begins to harden even as the morning sun spokes through the blinds. The action completes the struggle toward identity that had begun long ago with his attempt at a similar gesture with his friend Wesley during the sleep over. That gesture had proven as destructive as this gesture promises to be constructive. Craig, finally, takes life into his own hands. The sky lightens, and Craig affirms that "it is going to be a beautiful day." And in the same breath, he further notes, it is "the day they are going to try landing on the moon"—a day, Whitmore asserts, for Craig himself to begin the successful exploration of a radically new terrain, a terribly beautiful interior geography. It is a haunting moment of closing, finally, the schism within Craig, of restoring what had so long been missing, of rejecting the limiting definition of "normal." The puzzle, at last, is solved, and the reader recalls that as a boy Craig, so socially awkward, had earned his sole moment of local fame (a picture story in the local newspaper) for his amazing agility at assembling puzzles.

What, then, makes Nebraska the affirming testament for the AIDS decade although its action concludes in the summer of 1969? After the energetic rush from the closet in the 1970s introduced homosexuals as a rambunctious ethnic group hungry for expression, the AIDS realities introduced an entirely new rationale for suppression and denial. It is to that threat that Whitmore addresses his appeal. Denial would extinguish what Ferro had defined as the magic of the fragile constructions of emotional commitment. Denial puts all gays at risk. Like the child who dies from an unsuspected tumor, only the secret kills. Whitmore leaves Craig, restored and healed, at the very brink of the explosive energy of the 1970s when so much of the damage later defined by the AIDS virus would be accomplished. Without regret, without apology, without anger, without pity, Whitmore launches Craig, his sexual identity now powerfully asserted, into the breaking dawn of a day that would within a scant decade unleash a most absolute night. Even as he completed work on Nebraska, Whitmore revealed that he had been diagnosed with AIDS.

Our journals of these plague years, then, are compelled not by Boccacio's supreme escapism, Defoe's religious conviction, or Camus's stern existentialism. They are not compelled simply by the awareness of death or by pity but rather (much as the disease itself) by the contrapuntal pressures of love, sex, and death. Without that countermovement of eros, the literature, as with Hoffman's work, bottoms out in graceful pathos and struggles merely to engage death humanely. Refusing the posturings of anger or frustration against the endgame of the infection, the literature accepts a poisoned universe and offers the slenderest premise of synchronicity. Forsaking the conventional coming-out-of-the-closet novel, these novels (as well as Paul Monette's After Life, Edmund White's "Palace Days," Andrew Harvey's Burning Houses, David Leavitt's "Gravity") find virtue not merely in identity but in confluence.

It is inevitable, long before the virus is decoded by the medical community, that the intensity of interest generated in the latter half of the 1980s will diminish even as the infection grows exponentially. Inevitably the rhetoric over the AIDS crisis will be lost among other threats perceived significant enough to be cased within the apocalyptic rhetoric that will only increase as the century as well as the millennium close—crises over the steady depletion of the environment, the periodic shaking of significant geopolitical entities in strategic spots, the tectonic shifts in global economic conditions, the silent oppression of nuclear weaponry. And yet AIDS has generated a significant response—novels that are finally not journals of the plague years but rather defiantly journals against the plague years, novels that argue against a disease that escalates with a surreal insistency, against the emerging definition of ourselves as biohazards, against the emerging ideology of protection, against the difficult struggle to understand that sex can kill. These novels remind us, despite the simplest impulse to withdraw from each other, how bound we are each to the other. And they argue, finally, that we are to seize not the day, but rather each other.