TO DIE FOR

By R.Z. Sheppard

An AIDS novel that has the titanic as a central metaphor is a bit obvious. Which is what Allan Gurganus clearly intends. Nothing about Plays Well with Others (Knopf; 353 pages; $25) is coy, demure or otherwise closeted. In fact, the author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All now tells more than many readers, gay or straight, may have the patience to hear.

Richard Hartley Mims Jr., the novel's HIV-negative narrator, can't stop prematurely expostulating about his talented Greenwich Village friends who began dying from AIDS in the early '80s. Robert, an Iowa Adonis, squeezes a legendary social life and the completion of an epic symphony inspired by the Titanic into two blazing years. Angie, a part-time waitress, cracks the art world with large, spirited canvases and the smarts to know that even a gifted girl has to hustle. Mims' own promising career as a writer is detoured by home-nursing the stricken. His key ring, he notes with rueful pride, weighs three pounds.

Plays Well's generous burden is redundancy. Like Mims, Gurganus has a native connection to North Carolina and the windy school of Southern writing. But unlike many of its more portentous graduates, he grounds catastrophe with humor. A shopping bag full of sex toys splits open on a crowded subway. A whimsical riff describes heaven as a polymorphous playground where Emily Dickinson is one of the few chaste holdouts. Elsewhere too, Gurganus puts a lot of buck-and-wing into what his fictional half calls a "Comedy of this shuffle toward the crypt."

--By R.Z. Sheppard