Making A Life After AIDS

HALFWAY HOME by Paul Monette

Crown; 262 pages; $20

An estimated 1 million Americans carry the HIV virus, which causes AIDS, and Paul Monette is one of them. Three years ago he earned lavish praise for Borrowed Time, an unflinching memoir about his lover's death from that horrific disease. Last year he wrote Afterlife, the fictional story of three AIDS widowers. Now Monette is back with a new novel, Halfway Home, in which AIDS again plays a significant role. This time, however, his narrative is driven not by the experiences of those who are defeated by the disease but by those who defiantly make a life for themselves in spite of it.

Tom Shaheen's illness has advanced to the stage where he is too weak to continue his work as a performance artist, and so he retreats to a beach house near Malibu, Calif. The ordinary problems and passions of the world seemingly behind him, Tom reduces his ambitions simply to surviving. But his cloistered existence is disrupted by the arrival of his older brother Brian, a crooked contractor on the run, and an unexpected love affair with his devoted patron Gray. Tom rescues his brother. Gray rescues Tom. And Monette drives home his message: there is life after AIDS.

Writing with the urgency of someone who is unsure he will have enough time to finish, Monette delivers heavy-handed riffs on alcoholism, domestic violence, artistic freedom and the church's stand on homosexuality. He also indulges a fondness for melodrama that results in a climactic shoot-out and several teary reconciliations. But underneath all this activity rests Monette's gritty reminder, particularly relevant in these plague years, that the value of life is determined by what we are willing to risk for it.