Journals of The Plague Years

By R.Z. Sheppard

Before the tears, here are some icy numbers from the Centers for Disease Control. Of the 65,780 cases of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome reported in the U.S. since June 1981, 37,195 are now filed under Deceased. The rest seem likely to join them unless a magic bullet is discovered soon. Researchers are pessimistic.

This "retroactive" plague, as Andrew Holleran calls the AIDS epidemic in Ground Zero (Morrow; 228 pages; $16.95), is causing not only panic but a radical change in sensibilities. Phrases like "oral sex" and "anal penetration," once startling to read outside hard-covers, are now routinely bounced off satellites with the weather reports. "Making love," one of the sweetest phrases in the language, now suggests a cause of death. Still, the world is sharply divided into the sick and the well, and AIDS can be something of a lark if you are a robust heterosexual college student at a safe-sex lecture where the instructor demonstrates condom use on a cucumber. Only 4% of adult cases are known to have been caused through heterosexual contact. But for homosexual and bisexual males, who account for 63% of the cases, AIDS is nature's own genocide.

There are, of course, other victims: intravenous-drug users, prostitutes, infants condemned in the wombs of diseased mothers, and patients who received tainted blood transfusions. This last category provides the subject of one of the first AIDS novels, Alice Hoffman's At Risk (Putnam; 219 pages; $17.95), a suburban drama about an eleven-year-old schoolgirl gymnast who is inadvertently doomed during a routine appendectomy.

Nevertheless, AIDS is primarily associated with white, middle-class homosexuals, not only because of their numbers and high casualty rate but also because they are better organized and more articulate than other afflicted groups. It is somewhat patronizing to note that from Sappho to Capote, homosexuals have enriched Western literature. Today AIDS has put gay writers in the vortex of journalism.

Holleran's collection of essays and Paul Monette's memoir of his dying lover, Borrowed Time (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 342 pages; $18.95), are reports from the combat zone. They are far more personalized than Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On (1987), a survey of the medical, political and social impact of AIDS. Holleran and Monette stand waist-deep in the wreckage of homosexual society, particularly that mayfly culture that soared during the '70s and plunged abruptly when the virus struck hard at the beginning of the '80s.

Monette, a poet and novelist, gushes awkwardly about this brief golden age: "Roger and I were busy getting ready for a four-day trip to Big Sur, something we'd done almost yearly since moving to California in 1977. We were putting the blizzard of daily life on hold, looking forward to a dose of raw sublime that coincided with our anniversary." Monette comes across as a trendy Southern California transplant. There is lots of eating out in fashionable restaurants, foreign travel and a Jaguar whose transmission frequently does not work. While conscientiously caring for the dying Roger, Monette works on a film script titled The Manicurist. He reads Plato and writes a novelization of Arnold Schwarzenegger's movie Predator.

Only in the deathbed pages does Monette get sufficiently out of himself to write clearly and well. It is a saving grace after his career chatter, social calendar and hyperbolic rage against the Government. When he pops off about sexual hypocrisy, he mixes some astoundingly inappropriate metaphors: "I realize that in the world of the heterosexual there is a generalized lip service paid to exclusive monogamy, a notion most vividly honored in the breach."

Borrowed Time demands a sympathetic response instead of inviting one. Holleran and Hoffman, on the other hand, understand the first law of writing about personal misfortune: appalling facts, tersely put, speak for themselves. Holleran has the advantage of being a gifted novelist (Dancer from the Dance) with a keen, ironic intelligence. "Someday," he says, "writing about this plague may be read with pleasure, by people for whom it is a distant catastrophe, but I suspect the best writing will be nothing more, nor less, than a lament . . . The only other possible enduring thing would be a simple list of names -- of those who behaved well, and those who behaved badly."

Holleran knows the limits of stoicism. He qualifies the old saying "Life is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think" with "Too schematic . . . most of us think and feel." Ground Zero is the proof. It is a tragicomic tour through Manhattan's homosexual nighttown: the gay bathhouses, pornographic theaters and bars that the author cruised a decade ago. He finds the atmosphere radioactive with fear; sperm reminds him of plutonium. In this subdued climate, Holleran finds new enjoyment with his surviving gay companions. He meets many over freshly dug graves and notes the difference in his friends, "as if someone went from adolescence to late middle age without the intervening gradations."

In At Risk, Amanda Farrell will not make it to puberty. Nothing wrenches so hard as the death of a child, and Hoffman knows just when and where to tug. Like Holleran, Hoffman (The Drowning Season, Fortune's Daughter) is mainstreaming a refined literary talent. Her new novel is structured like a movie, which probably explains why 20th Century-Fox wasted no time buying the film rights.

At Risk is also a carefully composed work of fiction. From its first lines ("There is a wasp in the kitchen. Drawn by the smell of apricot jam, lazy from the morning's heat, the wasp hovers above the children"), Hoffman establishes a rhythm of inevitability. She sketches a bosky world in Massachusetts, populates it with wholesome families and engaging eccentrics. One young woman with modest paranormal powers seems like a character prewired for film directors who might want to plug in an occult package. But in the book she represents a sensitivity to mysteries of life and death that Amanda's family is too preoccupied to appreciate.

Hoffman gets the blend of hope and despair just right. She also conveys the social dimensions of childhood AIDS. The Farrells become pariahs: Amanda's friends and teammates shun her at their parents' insistence; her little brother Charlie gets cold-shouldered by his best friend; and her mother Polly gives up her free-lance photography business. On the up side, her father Ivan becomes friends with a terminally ill homosexual who is manning an AIDS hotline. Amanda's status as a potential gymnastic champion is more than a gimmick; it provides a standard by which her physical deterioration and emotional growth are measured. The little tumbler is a reminder that when A.E. Housman wrote "To an Athlete Dying Young," he did not mean this young. At Risk is a one-hankie book and could be a two-hankie movie. Not to worry. No , one ever got sick from crying. Tears, in fact, make good medicine.