Word: holleran
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
Next year, Holleran, Morrissey and Liz Reynolds will replace Edge and Miller as captains...