Resisting the Apocalypse: Telling Time in American Novels about AIDS, 1982-1992

(Doctoral Dissertation by Lisa Garmire, UCSB 1996)

Chapter 4: Borrowing Time in Paul Monette's Afterlife and Halfway Home

Generally I don't waste a minute, especially here in Trancas, figuring how short my time is. I've been at this thing for a year and a half, three if you count all the fevers and rashes. I operate on the casual assumption that I've still got a couple of years, give or take a galloping lymphoma. Day to day I'm not a dying man, honestly. (Halfway Home 4)

4.1 Introduction

       This chapter considers the importance of Paul Monette as an AIDS novelist and argues that his two AIDS novels, Afterlife and Halfway Home, constitute some of the most powerful strategies yet developed for resisting the apocalyptic AIDS narrative. In order to contextualize my reading of his two novels, the chapter begins with a brief biographical overview of his life and an assessment of the critical reception to his work. The chapter then situates his project as an AIDS novelist in the larger context of other writers writing about AIDS. This is followed by a reading first of Afterlife and then of Halfway Home, in which I analyze the significant ways these two novels counter the apocalyptic AIDS narrative, by drawing specific comparisons and contrasts to Facing It, the paradigmatic apocalyptic AIDS narrative.

4.2 Biographical Context

       In his second autobiography, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, which won a National Book Award, Paul Monette succinctly describes the silence of his early life as a closeted homosexual: "Until I was twenty-five, I was the only man I knew who had no story at all. I'd long since accepted the fact that nothing had ever happened to me and nothing ever would. That's how the closet feels, once you've made your nest in it and learned to call it home..." (1). During these early years, he attended Phillips Academy, Andover, and Yale, and then spent several years teaching at a variety of prep schools in the New England area and writing poetry. It wasn't until he came out in his later twenties, when he became involved with Roger Horowitz in 1974, and then when they moved to Los Angeles, that he turned to writing novels that depicted gay characters and themes. The early novels, as David Roman writes, "begin where most coming-out stories end; his protagonists have already come to terms with their sexuality long before the novel's projected time frame" (273-4), and Roman notes that "refreshingly for gay fiction, a secure gay male identity is the norm in his novels" (274).

       When AIDS struck Roger in the early 1980's, ultimately leading to his death in 1986, Monette began to focus on AIDS in his writing. His first autobiography, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, described the years that he and Roger battled with AIDS and his volume of poetry, Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, expressed the chaotic wildness of his emotional reaction to losing his lover to AIDS. These works were written as part of a coping process for Monette. As Monette himself writes in the Preface to Love Alone: "Writing [these poems] quite literally kept me alive, for the only time I wasn't wailing and trembling was when I was hammering at these poems" (xii). Not just personal, Monette's AIDS writing also contains both a political and social message, which he expresses in the Preface, "...I would rather have this volume filed under AIDS than under Poetry, because if these words speak to anyone they are for those who are mad with loss, to let them know they are not alone" (xi).

       Monette's autobiographical writing about AIDS and about his relationship to Roger are reminiscent of the kind of AIDS writing that Timothy Murphy has called "testimony." As Murphy describes it, "Testimony for the dead is not driven by a desire to overcome death, but to prevent it from eroding the meaningfulness of life. Testimony, not death, is the last word" (316). Monette testifies in Love Alone and Borrowed Time not only to Roger's passing, but more importantly, to the value of the life he and Roger shared together, to their love. He gained a great deal of publicity for these two works, and Borrowed Time was nominated for a National Book Award. Monette's changing stature as author and his growing prominence as a writer of AIDS has been colorfully described by John Clum:

Tragedy brings pain and insight: Monette, the writer of novelizations and unsold Whoopi Goldberg scripts, becomes an anguished, eloquent Jeremiah, angry at the insensitivity of many doctors, in whose cold hands people with AIDS become dependent patients, angry at the disease itself, but possessed, articulate, and gifted with the ability to forge a harrowing beauty out of pain, grief, and fury. Monette becomes the Bard of AIDS. (210)

3.3 Critical Reception to Afterlife and Halfway Home

       Unlike the reception to these autobiographical works, however, when Monette turns to writing novels about AIDS, there is no longer a universal agreement about the value of his work. As Roman has noted, there has been a mixed response to Monette's two AIDS novels, Afterlife and Halfway Home (279). Mainstream (nongay) reviewers praise his novels for their "universal" themes, but this universalized praise tends to discount and ultimately negate the specificities of the gay male experience Monette's novels describe.[1] Reviewers for gay publications, on the other hand, are frustrated by his novels' lack of "realism," which many feel is the only appropriate way for portraying so serious a thing as AIDS.[2] There also seems to be a regional bias in the reception to his two novels, with New York reviewers slighting Monette as "Hollywood slick." David Feinberg overtly expresses the New York attitude, when he writes in his review of Afterlife: "I admit I have a bias against an author who lists novelizations of Nosferatu, Predator and other screenplays beneath novels, poems and nonfiction. Maybe Afterlife was too Hollywood slick for me" (66).

       The primary source of disagreement in the critical reception has been Monette's manipulation of various popular forms, including romance, melodrama and irony. Depending on the critic, Monette's integration of popular forms either appears masterful or overblown. Roman praises "Monette's gift for manipulating such popular forms" (279), whereas John Weir criticizes Afterlife for "plot complications which sometimes resolve themselves with movie-of-the-week facility" (3). David Kaufman denigrates Halfway Home for containing a "slick pop-fiction style and enough melodramatic twists to betray aspirations for movie-of-the-week sale" (24). Though critics disagree about the "literary" quality of Monette's AIDS novels, there is a general agreement about their necessity as testimony to the AIDS epidemic. Weir aptly expresses this in his closing comments about Afterlife, in which he says that Monette's two AIDS novels are "written in what Norman Mailer called ‘bestseller style,' a book that holds your interest not because of the beauty of the language, but because of the urgency, and the immediacy, of the story" (3).

       Though I agree with the general criticisms that there are aspects of Monette's AIDS novels that lack finesse - such as his occasionally simplistic rendering of secondary characters and abrupt plot twists, as well as his periodic use of hyperbolic language - I also feel that none of the critics have really considered his work in light of the growing body of literature, novels about AIDS. If we read Monette's novels and understand both their context and their contribution to this new field of literature, we find in their narrative configurations a provocative disruption of the apocalyptic AIDS narrative that predominates in so many of the novels about AIDS. Indeed, as I will demonstrate, his two AIDS novels offer some of the most unique and important resistances to date of the apocalyptic AIDS narrative.

3.4 The Novelist's Dilemma in Novelizing AIDS

       Fictionalizing the experience of AIDS in the form of a novel has been a source of debate, especially among gay writers confronting the topic. On the one hand, to fictionalize an experience that decimated a generation of gay men and that continues to exact a heavy toll seems to trivialize their history. In his AIDS autobiography, Ground Zero, Andrew Holleran explains why he has not written a novel about AIDS: "Novels weren't needed...The truth was quite enough; there was no need to make it up. To attempt to imagine such scenes seemed an impertinence of the worst kind" (13). Indeed, he feels that, as a literary form, the novel cannot fully capture the experience of AIDS:

The novel is occasionally the way we bring some sort of order to the disorder of life. But this disorder seemed way beyond the writer's powers. Literature could not heal or explain this catastrophe; the one thing about the plague that became clearer as it progressed was its senseless, accidental, capricious quality. (16)

       Other authors who have actually considered writing novels about AIDS have been daunted by the rigid plot structure AIDS seems to impose. Adam Mars-Jones has described the difficulties he encountered when trying to write a novel about AIDS:

In any novel about Aids there are likely to be rites of passage, hard to avoid but hard to reshape, retroviral equivalents of the Stations of the Cross: first knowledge of the epidemic, first friend sick, first death, first symptom...How do you tell a fresh story when the structure is set? (1)

The attitudes of Holleran and Mars-Jones mark the two extremes of the debate about fictionalizing AIDS, which is reflected in Joseph Cady's helpful distinction between "immersive" and "counter-immersive" AIDS writing. On the one side is Holleran's attitude, that to fictionalize AIDS is to risk "impertinence of the worst kind," and thus he does not write fiction about AIDS. This resistance to writing about AIDS reflects Cady's concept of "counterimmersive AIDS writing."[3] On the other side is Mars-Jones' attitude, that to fictionalize AIDS is to find oneself locked into an apocalyptic, doomed narrative structure. Cady prefers this "immersive AIDS writing," because it forces the reader to confront the deadly threat of AIDS. Central to all immersive AIDS writing, Cady writes, "are prolonged moments when the reader is thrust into a direct imaginative confrontation with the special horrors of AIDS and is required to deal with them with no relief or buffer provided by the writer" (244).[4]

       Remarkably, Paul Monette's two AIDS novels, Afterlife and Halfway Home, are neither "impertinence" nor apocalyptic, neither counterimmersive nor simply immersive. Perhaps this explains their mixed reception. Though they cannot heal or explain the epidemic, Monette's AIDS novels do tell a fresh story about AIDS. Unlike many of the AIDS novels discussed in Chapter Two, whose narratives rush apocalyptically toward the tragedy of death from AIDS, Monette's two novels are unique in that they are firmly rooted in describing life; his novels refuse tragedy in favor of romance. In his insistent focus on the life and thus the agency of his characters, Monette participates in the activist art that Douglas Crimp calls for, when he writes, "We don't need a cultural renaissance; we need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS" (7). Monette himself comments on the public duty a writer has, in an interview with Maria Maggenti: "'...a writer is not an excuse to close the door and have private fantasies and private realities: It's a resposibility to live with public realities'"(57).

       His two AIDS novels act as cultural artifacts that describe, engage and question cultural practices regarding AIDS, and as such, they provide interpretive sites in which the reader can interrogate the meaning(s) of AIDS. Monette recognizes Paula Treichler's point, that AIDS is a social construction and, as such, its meaning is intimately linked to language. As she puts it,

The name AIDS in part constructs the disease and helps make it intelligible. We cannot therefore look 'through' language to determine what AIDS 'really' is. Rather we must explore the site where such determinations really occur and intervene at the point where meaning is created: in language. (31)

Where Treichler stops with locating the meaning of AIDS in language, I would push further to look at how the language of AIDS combines to form a dominant cultural narrative that engages a particular "logic" (to borrow from Linda Singer), which works to insist on the apocalyptic threat AIDS poses.[5]  Indeed, it is at this point of narrative structuring that Monette's novels function the most radically to restructure and to retell the dominant cultural narrative of AIDS.

       Even the titles to his two AIDS novels express this different way of interpreting and representing AIDS. Neither accedes to the apocalyptic threat of AIDS: though tempered by death, "afterlife" indicates the life that comes after, and "halfway home" implies a process, a journey, toward a resting place, toward "home." Monette makes it quite clear in his novels that he feels the only hope for a person living with HIV or AIDS is to live life in the present, which means having made peace with one's past and recognizing one's future for what it is (namely, limited - but not dead, yet). For Monette, it is only by living life in the present that a person can find love, which he feels is the only real reason to keep fighting AIDS and to continue to live. As he said in one of the last speeches he gave, a little over three months before his death from an AIDS-related illness, "...all that will matter in the end of your life is how much you've loved and how much you've given back" ("Choosing" 136).[6]

3.5.1 The Narrative Structure of Afterlife

       In Afterlife, Monette explicitly addresses the issue of how to live with HIV. The novel traces the life stories of three diverse, HIV+ men over a period of several months, about a year following the deaths from AIDS of their lovers. In fact, white, middle class, travel agent Steven Shaw, body-building Adonis Sonny Cevathas and Mexican gardiner Dell Espinoza were originally thrust together when their lovers first were all hospitalized in adjacent rooms and then all died in the same week at Cedar-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. The novel opens with what appears to be the last of their Saturday night "widowers' gatherings," which they have been observing for the last year since their lovers' deaths. Following the opening chapter, the narrative then interweaves the three plot strands of Steven's developing relationship with Mark Inman, of Sonny's sexual escapades and his forays into New Age mysticism, and of Dell's politically channeled rage and his ultimate acts of assassination and suicide. Steven's house becomes the site at which the plot interweaving takes place, beginning in Chapter One with the widows' gathering and then culminating in Chapter Ten, with the Thanksgiving Dinner. Monette spends approximately equal portions of the novel developing these three different plot strands (though with a bit more attention to the character most like himself - Steven Shaw).[7]

3.5.2 Running For Your Life: Sonny Cevathas

Afterlife develops a rich and textured portrayal of the lives of people in urban Los Angeles. Rather than focus on characters who become increasingly isolated by their conditions (like Andy in Facing It) or on small groups of friends, either in elite, well-to-do urban settings or in rural settings, removed from the bustle of city existence, Monette describes the lives of his three main characters as they actively interface with the larger communities in which they exist.[8]

       In the figure of Sonny, Monette provides a glimpse of one kind of gay experience, that of the West Hollywood fast-life: "Sonny Cevathas was one of the gods of Prime Time. His own waitering schedule was clustered on the weekend, so that all he needed to pick up during the week was a couple of lunches...The Body Works was Sonny's living room, his office and his yard" (61). Christopher Davis characterizes Sonny as "pure, selfish sensuality, always on the move" (21), and yet, Sonny is also a man in denial of his HIV status. Though his lover Ellsworth died of AIDS, he refuses to get tested for HIV: "He knew he had made the right choice not to be tested for the virus. The real test was the vast aliveness he felt at the end of Prime Time, gathering his workout clothes and stuffing them in his gym bag, feeling a throb in his groin from the smell of his own sweat" (64). Sonny resists mourning Ellsworth's death as a strategy for his own emotional survival.

       Rather than mourn the tragic and horrible randomness with which AIDS has killed Ellsworth, Sonny turns to New Age mysticism as a way to separate the failings of the physical body from the spiritual. This strategy enables him to remember Ellsworth's goodness and yet blame him for his physical failings:

This, he had come to see, was where Ellsworth had failed him, by keeping Sonny's body at the objectified level of pure desire. If only Ellsworth could have broken through metaphysically, he never would have gotten sick at all. In his own way Sonny had truly loved Ellsworth and tried not to judge him. He understood that different men had different karmas to enact. But the last of the grief he felt was indistinguishable from a sort of moral posture, that a man made a journey of his own devising. (64)

Sonny wants to believe that, unlike Ellsworth, he himself can live by the philosophy of mind over matter. His faith in this philosophy, however, is soon challanged.

       AIDS impinges on Sonny's life, though through the course of the novel, we watch him continue to try and deny the threat AIDS poses. When his roommate Dirk has obviously come down with AIDS-related symptoms, including hairy oral leukoplakia and flu-like symptoms, Sonny runs away: "Sonny practically lurched from the room, hurrying out of the apartment as if he was late..." (100). Under no circumstances does Sonny want to be reminded of how AIDS has affected his life: "There was such a wall up between him and Ellsworth's illness that he didn't let the memories flood back in, refused to see again the white patches that foamed over Ellsworth's tongue, or hear the amulet phrase they had repeated over and over: 'Just the flu'" (100). Sonny refuses to let the memories flood back in - he will not face the past. He rushes his things from the AIDS-haunted apartment, loading up the Mercedes, the only thing besides an armload of cashmere sweaters that he has left of Ellsworth, and heads over to stay at Steven's.

       During this time, he is on the look-out for a sugar-daddy, or at least someone to provide a place for him to live, which he momentarily finds in the figure of Sean Pfeiffer, an extremely wealthy, nouveau riche man, who has made his fortune in cable franchise. As Sonny thinks of him, "A total top and a total asshole" (185). Sean is initially seduced by Sonny's beauty, and they engage in long, crystal-stimulated episodes of sex, during which Sean appraises Sonny: "While Sonny soaped him down, he stroked the Greek with a meaty hand, lingering on the buttocks in a proprietary way...For if he'd learned nothing else from having an ocean of money, he knew that the rich could own the beautiful" (186). But Sean wants nothing of damaged goods, and soon after he has noticed the small, slightly raised, red spot on Sonny's biceps, he dumps Sonny, handing him $2,000 and telling him to get the spot checked out. Sonny denies that the spot is Kaposi's Sarcoma (KS), and he refuses to accept the implications of the present moment, a time in which AIDS has begun to leave its mark on his body.

       Instead, Sonny turns to a channeler named Salou, whose New Age philosophy empowers him to continue his denial of the past and the present, in favor of a magical future. Salou not only tells him that he is not gay, but that he can also escape the "gay disease." Salou says, "'That will pass,' declared Salou. 'Once you leave the path. Your soul is too old to die young'" (234). Sonny desperately wants to believe Salou's words - that, through an alteration of his mind and a purification of his body, he can escape the tragedy of his past and the threat of his present bodily condition, and that the future holds the possibility of complete renewal. When he goes home that night, he throws away his material possessions, all those things that have until now marked his gay identity: "Tossed in a Hefty bag his porno tapes, his poppers, butt plug, leather straps. Even his jock-strap. All the evidence he could gather of his carnal ride across the world of the body. He regretted none of it, missed none of it, as he dumped it all in the trash can at the curb" (234). Sonny wants to reject his gay identity, as though doing so would alleviate his past suffering, vanquish the red spot on his biceps, and produce a new, clean life: "If he wasn't gay anymore, perhaps he could reinvent being a boy from the bottom up" (253). As Sonny gets into his Mercedes 380, preparing to disappear from the novel, Steven urges him to take the mangy, transient dog who has adopted Steven's house and Sonny, in particular, as his own. Reluctantly, Sonny grants Steven's request: "The last thing Sonny had ever permitted, the very last thing - except for Ellsworth - was someone in love with him, but that was the old life when he was still gay. What the hell, he thought, and reached over and flung open the passenger's door" (274). Though Sonny acquiesces to take the dog, his last thoughts of the novel still express the desire to deny his gay identity.

       In the figure of Sonny, Monette portrays one kind of response to AIDS. This response is one of denial. It denies the impact of AIDS on the past and rejects the implications of AIDS on the present, in favor of focusing forward on a magical future in which AIDS won't exist. Sonny's denial of his gay identity is reminiscent of AIDS discourse that signifies AIDS as a "gay disease." If we read Sonny as engaging this homophobic logic, then he wants to believe that if he isn't gay, then he can't have AIDS. This denial of AIDS and implicit shame of one's homosexual identity is reminiscent of Cady's comments about authors who produce "counterimmersive writing" about AIDS, that this denial of AIDS "seems to be rooted in a lingering depression about homosexuality and in stereotyped understandings of it" (258). Though Monette does not condemn Sonny's behavior, his novel does convey the sense that Sonny's coping strategy of denial prevents him from doing more with his life than simply running from AIDS and from himself, his past and his present, toward some fantasy future. There are costs involved in Sonny's approach to dealing with his HIV status and with his life. As the novel illustrates, Sonny can never stay in any one place long, and therefore, he is unable to develop any real commitments, all of which take time. Sooner or later, the past and the present come together in his bodily condition, which threatens the strength of his denial, so he must continue running forward toward the future with the hope that AIDS won't catch him. He drives right out of the narrative of the text, so in one sense, Monette portrays him as evading AIDS. Monette does not close Sonny's life story but leaves it on the open highway.

3.5.3 Grief Can Kill: Dell Espinoza

       In contrast to Sonny, who focuses on hopes for the future, Dell Espinoza is trapped in his past. Unable to successfully mourn the loss of his lover, Marcus, he cannot make a life for himself in the present or make plans for the future. The only thing that ties him to living are his feelings of filial responsibility to his sister, Linda. Dell and his sister form part of Monette's multicultural depiction of Los Angeles. Dell is a Mexican gardener, who originally met Marcus, the professor of Mayan anthropology, on the freeway: "Bumper-to-bumper traffic, southbound on the 405 - Marcus in lane 2, Dell in lane 3, flirting like truckers all the way to Laguna. How else did professors and gardeners meet?" (57). Dell, like the other widowers of Afterlife, lost Marcus to AIDS about a year prior to the novel's action, and in the year since, Dell has tried several strategies to cope with his grief.

       Through Dell, Monette attests to one kind of sex born of the AIDS epidemic, telephone sex. Monette describes its appeal and the intricacies of 976 etiquette in the age of AIDS:

Dell never said a word about himself, or anyway not the truth, especially that Marcus had died of AIDS. In a jerkoff scene it was very bad form to bring up one's lover, let alone the holocaust. Dell was content to be a kind of scoutmaster to his 976 crew. When he called around he changed like a chameleon - sometimes Italian, sometimes twenty-five, top with bottom urges, rapist, virgin - anything not to be one particular man, especially himself. (51).

Over the phone lines, fantasy becomes reality and the horror of the holocaust can be momentarily forgotten. And yet, the very anonymity of the encounters has a deadening effect on Dell: "His hundred men with their vital stats were too familiar, too predictable, as hard to quicken as a sleepy wife. Of course he could go back into the pile, pay his twenty cents a minute to the LOAD line and start a new page. But he already had one of every kind" (52). Telephone sex fails to satisfy Dell; his fantasy partners cannot replace Marcus, and he turns his rage at AIDS to acts of telephone terrorism.

       His first act of telephone terrorism consists of calling a television station and claiming that he's dropped a gallon of AIDS-infected blood into one of the water-sources for Los Angeles, a water reservoir outside of Los Angeles proper. This act of terrorism elicits some public response, and Dell becomes a way for Monette to comment on aspects of the homophobia surrounding AIDS. Dell's primary target of rage is Mother Evangeline, a middle-aged, white, American woman, who preaches hatred of homosexuals to a multi-ethnic group of immigrants. On Halloween, he stalks her ministry in a ghoul outfit, witnessing the horrible hypocrisy of her message:

His red eyes scanned the room and picked out the whitest woman, a honey blonde in her mid-forties, sleek in a beige wool suit. She was clearly more expensive than all the immigrant mothers...She began to speak, and at the first sound of her lush and lulling voice, the room fell into a reverent silence..."Ours is the kingdom, don't ever forget it. And thank God for AIDS. Sometimes He is a God of wrath before He is a God of love. And we are His army. Remember that next Tuesday. Yes on 81!" (137)

Her rhetoric mirrors the classic right wing point of view, which sees AIDS as a fitting curse for homosexual sin and which seeks to bring Church and State together through a mobilization of congregations to vote. Dell vandalizes her church office but then he must go into hiding. Steven's house provides a sanctuary for him.

       With Dell, Monette portrays a man not only unable to recover from his personal grief, but also a man consumed by rage at the larger social context of AIDS, including cultural discourses on God:

Between God and Marcus he could only believe in one at a time, and Marcus always won. God was back in Morelia, the queer priest in his gold cloak seething for the altar boys, Beatriz and her useless novenas. God didn't have enough rage...Not even revenge was enough of a reason to believe, for he couldn't pin the enemy down to any one man. Chaos was what mattered. Watching the world unstring itself, with just a snip of the thread here and there. Not that he wished to hurt anyone, except maybe God himself. (52-53)

Dell's rage is reminiscent of the rage that has fueled some members of gay communities decimated by AIDS, including Larry Kramer, Michael Callen and David Wojnarowicz. Like these historical figures, Dell will not submit, will not be an "AIDS victim": "Every single night before he went to sleep, he had to be finished with the world, in case he woke up too sick to go on. All he knew was this: before he went he would do what he had to, whatever it was, to let them know his people wouldn't go quietly anymore" (53). Dell's rage drives him to wish for more chaos, since revenge needs a target he can't clearly identify. AIDS is too complex, too multidimensional, too enormous for him to fully comprehend. Thomas Yingling has described the sublimity of the AIDS epidemic: "Inscribed since its appearance as profoundly unimaginable, as beyond the bounds of sense, the AIDS epidemic is almost literally unthinkable in its mathematical defeat of cognitive desire" (291-2).

       Through the course of the novel, Dell manages to constrain his rage because of his love for his sister, Linda, though she is aware that he is suffering. Following Dell's vandalism of Mother Evangeline's office, Linda confides in Steven who has agreed to hide Dell:

Only after Steven had agreed to give her brother sanctuary did Linda begin to pour out all her terror. How she had seen him withdraw deeper and deeper for months now, willfully almost - the opposite of putting the passion of his grief behind him, letting it fade to a dull ache the way it had with her. Dell Espinoza's passion only seemed to grow more violent and more secret. In the month that followed the anniversary, she thought he was going to kill himself, and could even feel that the one thing holding him back was Linda herself - the last protective urge he felt as head of the family. (165)

When Dell thinks that Linda has found a partner in Heather, one of the workers at Steven's travel agency, he feels released of this family bond. Heather has taken Linda under her wing and will teach her the ropes of being a secretary for Shaw Travel, so Linda will no longer have to be a cleaning woman. Dell begins to disconnect from reality. Chaos begins to run him: "Did he know what he wanted? Not quite yet. He was still making this up as he went along...He astonished himself every step of the way. It was all he had anymore to prove he was still alive, the surge of unlikeliness, the opposite of reason" (246).

       When he rides the bus to Mother Evangeline's, the gun resting hidden in his lap, his rage no longer drives him forward, "Anger wasn't a part of it all anymore. Anger might have veered him from the path. This was passionless, indifferent, not quite real" (269). When he shoots Mother Evangeline, he acts without reason: "He shot directly into her face, no hate anymore, no reason...Dell seemed perplexed, not having figured the next part out. It was really almost an afterthought that he put the gun in his mouth" (272). By the end, reason, feeling, family, none of the things that contribute to a person's feeling connected to life, apply to Dell. The rage that had consumed and driven him through the year following Marcus' death dissipates into a chaotic state of nonfeeling and disconnected reality, such that no life-affirming narrative is left available to him. Quite literally, the murder/suicide excise him from the life of the novel. He's dead, no longer a part of the narrative. His sister and his other friends will live on, however, so in one respect, through the power of memory, Dell will not die.

       Dell is an ambiguous and troubling figure. Is he "something of a lunatic," as Christopher Davis describes him? Or is he merely "the stereotypical gardener and the 'hot-blooded' activist,'" that David Feinberg claims? Or rather, does he symbolize what Roman notes as "the revolutionary impulse [that] many gay men, including men of color, feel is a necessary and legitimate reponse to AIDS"? Perhaps he is a bit of each. On the one hand, his attempts to affect the larger social complacency about AIDS seem more admirable than, for example, Sonny's desire to run away from AIDS and from what we will see to be Steven's somewhat bourgeois complacency. And yet, his attempts at terrorism do not affect the needed changes to alter the course of AIDS. Indeed, they almost seem to backfire, as Steven observes, when he sees the television coverage of Dell's murder/suicide:

The coverage was already starting to accrue the nimbus of martyrdom...Steven could see just where it was going. Within hours the telegenic priests and rabbis would be coming out of the walls to denounce and decry. Mainstream guys, not just the Jesus fringe and the Aryan nuts. With one fell stroke, it seemed, Dell Espinoza had set things back a generation, all the making nice and the coalition-building. (276)

Though Steven finds fault with Dell's political tactics, his point of view here does not simply reflect Monette's, even though Steven is the character in the novel most similar to Monette. Monette's primary concern is not with the destructive consequences of Dell’s political tactics but with the destructiveness of his emotional outlook. In the figure of Dell, Monette indicates that anger and the inability to let the past go through making peace with it does not offer life-affirming options for a person living with HIV.

3.5.4 Steven Shaw: Love-life/ Loving Life

       In contrast to Sonny and Dell, Steven Shaw represents a man who has made some peace with his HIV status and the loss of his lover, Victor. Steven's grief "had dwindled at last to a quiet throb, like a broken bone that ached in the rain" (165). It is through Steven that Monette portrays what it means to live with HIV. For example, on Steven's first date with his future lover, Mark Inman, we can see how different Steven's attitude compares to Mark's hopeless feelings about AIDS. Mark wonders why he shouldn't just kill himself sooner as opposed to later; afterall, since AIDS means death, why wait for the horrors of AIDS to destroy his body? We then hear Steven's life-affirming response: "'Well,' Steven replied carefully. 'Sometimes people stick around for other reasons. So they can stay with people they love'" (67).

       In the opening of the novel, Steven still grieves for Victor. The smell of the hotel soaps that Victor had collected from their world travels fills him with sad memories and he impulsively throws them away, yet catches himself, suddenly afraid "that he would throw away everything that murmured Victor's name and be left with nothing" (2). His grief also keeps him away from his work at the travel agency: "...he stayed out of the office. Shaw Travel mocked him now with all its promise of freedom, the paradise beaches and Gold Card souvenirs. For Steven travel was over. He'd become a walking bad advertisement, like a misspelled sandwich board" (9). Though the novel begins by describing Steven as a grieving "widow," the opening scene at the widows' gathering also shows him meeting a man who he has not seen in several years, and they discover a personal connection to each other - Mark had also been Victor's lover, but some 10 years previously. As the evening proceeds, they find some quiet time together, looking at several of Steven's photo albums that contain pictures of Victor. At this moment, Mark reveals to Steven that several days previously, he'd lost a lover to AIDS. In this moment of intimacy, they grow closer, but Mark is threatened by his emotions: "'I can't cry,' Mark announced with a certain psychic precision, as if they were playing chess by mail. At that he withdrew his hand from Steven's touch, restoring the equal distance, man to man. Nobody seemed to have anything safe or comfortable to say" (17). Their relationship will proceed in a similar fashion, not safe, not comfortable. Mark is having a great deal of trouble accepting his HIV status, and Steven has forgotten how to love, which he realizes after their initial interaction: "Steven realized he hadn't looked in anybody's eyes in over a year, not since the light began to go for Victor. Not even in his own eyes, not even in the mirror" (18). The first chapter ends with Steven alone again in his empty house: "His party had vanished like a parlor trick. There was no more mud [pies] in the freezer. He couldn't even imagine what he needed" (20).

       As the novel progresses, Steven begins to learn what he needs, that is, to live again through a developing relationship with Mark. This part of the plot reads somewhat like a romance, but an awkward one. Monette does not euphemistically describe Steven's romantic rebirth, but explicitly chronicles Steven's sexual rebirth as well. Steven evolves sexually, from virtual abstinence on his first date with Mark, "As to equipment, Steven had scarcely glanced at his own in months" (68), to a renewed interest in masturbation:

Now he jerked himself off at night, sometimes snapping a cockring on, sometimes a full trussing with the rawhide...now it was every night. He'd even stocked in a few stroke books. But the fantasies were very careful - never Mark, certainly never Victor. In fact, he found himself roaming way back, to Boston fifteen years ago or his randy first summer in Europe, dicks of the ancient world. The deep past was the one safe place where a man could still go. (152)

Monette draws attention here to the larger historical experience of AIDS for Steven's generation of gay men. As John Clum has noted, these men "came of age in the Stonewall generation" and can remember the "real glory days" of the 70's before AIDS, "the time before the war" (664). Monette's depiction of Steven's memories of sexual desire affirms gay history, as Clum writes, "Memory of desire - is a central characteristic of gay literature in the age of AIDS as gay men fight the inroads of the virus and the oppressive constructions that could rob them of the freedom and pride gained in the now-compromized past" ("And Once" 218-19). Unlike apocalyptic AIDS narratives, especially unlike Facing It with its portrayal of the disintegration of Andy and David's sexual relationship, Afterlife depicts Steven, an HIV+ man, rediscovering and enjoying his sexuality. Though for sexual fantasy he must go back in memory to "the time before the war," Steven still enjoys his sexuality at the present time.

       Rather than focus on the death that HIV threatens, Steven wants to concentrate on the life his love-relationship with Mark has created. When Ray Lee dies of AIDS and they attend his funeral, Steven is impatient to leave: "Steven wasn't thinking of Ray or even Victor. He held himself back, abstracted, almost bored, yet hungry to be out of here and back in the soup of life. He glared at Mr. Corason with loathing, as if that manicured queen were Death's doorman himself" (259). Here Steven expresses Monette's strategy for coping with AIDS. Steven doesn't want to dwell on the past, represented by Victor, and he doesn't want to think of Ray, whose death from AIDS predicts his own. Instead, he is hungry to be "back in the soup of life," of living life in the present time with his new lover, Mark.

       Mark's feelings about his HIV status undergo transformation both through his involvement with Steven and through a pivotal trip he makes to visit his father. When Mark goes to visit his father in Florida, he experiences several surprising revelations. His mom had died some ten years earlier, and a couple of years ago, his father, Rob, had had a heart attack. As a precaution, Rob quit working and joined a retirement community, where he met and fell in love with a woman named Roz. During his visit, Mark finally comes out to Rob, reveals his HIV status, and mentions his newly developing relationship with Steven. To Mark's amazement, Rob is completely unfazed by any of this, however, he admonishes Mark to not squander his developing relationship with Steven: "'The lucky ones are like Roz and me, we get another chance. We know it's not for long. Two years, three years - just like you say. But it's all there is, so you'll take even a little. Everything else is shit'" (178). At this moment, Mark's father articulates Monette's philosophy of life, which Mark is now beginning to understand. 

       By the end of the novel, Mark has quit his job as a Hollywood executive, and Steven and he are planning to travel using Steven's travel perks. The last moments of the novel describe Steven and Mark alone together in bed, falling. In this last passage of the novel, Steven's point of view clearly aligns with Monette's:

Even going under he could taste the simple wish that overrided all the rest: to stay in the middle of this with Mark as long as he could. Perfectly selfish, except it was deeper than that - the last dance, the last pocket of air. Nothing else was happening right now in Steven's house, a luxury beyond calculation. The sleepers had all they needed. Only to lie like this between the bombs, dreaming away and not alone, because time was very short. (278, my emphasis)

Unlike the "it" that drove the narrative of Facing It, an "it" that reverberated with the threat of death, of closure, of AIDS, here Monette plays with the term "this": to "stay in the middle of this," to "lie like this." "This" indicates life, indicates the space in which actions take place, the space/time of life in the present, "to stay" and "to lie" in a time here right now. This time is not an apocalyptic one; it lies in a space "between the bombs," between the time of apocalypse. The urgency of these actions is driven by the lack of time, "time was very short," but Steven will stay in life because of Mark, "as long as he could." Christopher Davis has complained that in Afterlife Monette conflates an HIV diagnosis with death, and other critics have read this as a dark book of sadness about AIDS. I would argue that in this passage, Monette's position is not easily tragic and certainly not straightforwardly apocalyptic. The bombs have fallen and will drop again. Monette is not a Sonny who believes AIDS will magically disappear. Apocalypse will someday come. But the emphasis he insists upon is that Steven's wish "to stay in the middle of this with Mark," is "deeper than" the End, "the last dance, the last pocket of air." Death and the last moments will come - but right now, this is more important: "to lie like this, "dreaming away and not alone," because, as Monette admonishes us in his last words of the novel, time is very short.

3.6 Family Life and Community in Afterlife

       In another contrast to Facing It, Afterlife does not depict a solitary AIDS patient as he spirals downward toward his death, surrounded only by helpless doctors, a lover and a narrowing circle of friends. Instead, Afterlife describes a richly textured web of interrelated relationships. The Thanksgiving dinner scene, a central moment in the narrative when the three plot strands come together again, conveys Monette's vision of one possible alternative to traditional, biological, nuclear families:

Mark sat next to Angela on the sofa and was exquisitely charming, making it clear that his bitterness toward her husband didn't extend to her. That said, the two of them launched into an orgy of slurs against the person of Lou Ciotta [her husband]. Across the way Heather negotiated an intricate discussion between Linda and Ray about household customs in Mexico and Korea, like a Berlitz class gone slightly haywire.

       Sitting on the floor and eating off the coffee table, Andy told Sonny and Dell the tale of his coming out, blow by blow. He didn't seem to care that both his listeners were utterly preoccupied and lost in thought. Sonny cast blushing glances at Angela, smitten like a teenager. All the red and soreness of his flesh had vanished. He was pure spirit. Beside him Dell still seemed to be watching the blank screen of the Sony, as if he could see in the dusk there the shape of his next reprisal. (222)

Brought together by the calamity of AIDS, this family is a motley assortment of genders, cultures and races. As Davis writes about this assortment of characters, "It's a [sic] quite a mix, but it works" (21).      Afterlife also describes a seropositive rap/support group that Steven and Mark attend on Thursday nights. Like the extended family, this group reflects the diversity of people afflicted by AIDS in Los Angeles. Monette notes their diversity: "In fact they were all bizarrely different from each other, random as a planeload of refugees..." (72).  Most of the group's members are gay men, ranging in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-fifties. There are also several women in the group, including Marina, who contracted HIV from a hemophiliac boyfriend, and Charlene, a black woman, who contracted HIV from an IV-drug-using male partner. About Charlene, Monette writes,

 Charlene was the thirdest world among them by a long shot, however disenfranchised the militant gay ones felt. They never knew what to say to her, an ex-hooker with two kids no father would claim, four generations of women accordioned into an apartment off Pico. Yet Charlene never truly complained, so accustomed was she to bad shit, and seemed content with the sheer diversion of Thursday's men. (152)

Though she is accustomed to “bad shit,” Charlene still finds value in her life and she reiterates Monette's philosophy for living with AIDS, when she reminds the gay men in the rap/support group that time is passing: "'Seem like you boys wanna fall in love awful bad,' she drawled. 'You better get movin', huh? I got me my chirren, where's your man? Time goin'. Stop talkin' about it [love]'" (152).

       Monette's depiction of secondary characters in Afterlife is a matter of some controversy. David Feinberg finds Monette’s use of dialect to depict Charlene's speech ("chirren," for example) "jarring.” Feinberg's criticism extends to most of Monette's secondary characters, and he writes of Afterlife that its "secondary characters are less well drawn" because of what he sees as Monette's tendency to stick characters into convenient, stereotyped slots (66). Other critics, however, find this to be an admirable economy of form. Christopher Davis, for example, praises Monette's ability to efficiently convey personalities and information, "just [by] capturing with a word or two, or a short phrase, what takes lesser writers great effort, if they are able to do it at all" (21). David Roman has voiced the concern that Monette's depiction of minorities lacks a certain sensitivity to the plight of people of color with AIDS (279). Indeed, there are only two characters who die in the novel, Dell and Ray Lee, one from suicide and one from AIDS. Monette's portrayal of Ray Lee, a Korean PLWA, has drawn criticism from Roman, who notes that "...the novel fails to address why Ray Lee, the only person who dies of AIDS, also happens to be a gay man of clor" (279). Roman goes on to say that "while much could be said of the discriminatory lack of access to health care many people of color with AIDS must confront, Ray's death is never fully accounted for in Afterlife" (279). While I find these criticisms of the novel to be a bit narrowly politicized, I do think Monette's portrayal of Ray Lee is problematic with respect to race.

       Part of the difficulties with how Ray Lee is represented is that the reader is not invited into his consciousness; we do not ever see from Ray's point of view. He thus seems more of an object at which other people look. Additionally, more often than not, Monette refers to him not as Ray Lee but as "the Korean," which calls attention to his racial difference. Ray’s portrayal is also problematic because most of the time the reader sees Ray through Steven's eyes, and Steven's preference for straight-acting men colors his attitude towards Ray, especially since Ray is the epitome of a queen. Unfortunately, Ray’s effeminacy links together with his Asian-American identity, such that the representation of him in the novel comes dangerously close to a racial stereotyping of the Asian-American male as effeminized and as exotically non-Western. In one revealing scene toward the end of the novel, just before Ray's death from AIDS, we can see how complex and problematic the connection is between Steven's and Monette's point of view. In this passage, Steven sees Ray lying naked in bed and beginning to suffer from AIDS dementia:

He didn't seem to be in any pain. It was all rage. Startling because the Korean's demeanor had always been so placid. His rib cage was a pair of praying hands, every bone distinct. Steven couldn't help but see his dick, long and uncut, the foreskin tapering generously like an anteater's snout. Steven blushed at the violation of Ray's privacy, then flinched with self-flagellation to find himself wondering if uncut was the general rule for Asians. Surely not. They were so fastidious. Shut up, he screamed in his head. (238)

This passage indicates that Steven is aware of his own racial stereotypes of Asians and is ashamed of them. Perhaps part of the difficulty with the text in relation to Ray is that to call attention to one's race is not necessarily racist, unless one invokes stereotypes that belittle the person being described. In Afterlife, Monette simplistically portrays Ray, drawing from certain stereotypes about Asian men, but Ray is not ultimately denigrated. Indeed, Ray's  presence in the novel is key, since he embodies the AIDS that the three widowers' and their HIV+ friends will inevitably have to face. One could just as easily argue, however, that for a character to function merely as a plot device and as a source of spectacle is also to deny the agency or fully human aspects of that character. I must conclude that Monette's depiction of Ray is troubling.

       Like Ray, Margaret is another problematically portrayed character in Afterlife. Her position in the novel is unique as the only straight, white woman, and she acts repeatedly as a maternal figure. She helps Steven run his travel agency, and she continually nurtures him and assists the other gay men when they need help. When Steven mourns the loss of Victor, "she moved swiftly to cradle him in her arms, he who was so lost and far from home, unanchored and alone, who would never again want a ticket anywhere" (12). She sacrifices her own love-life to care for Ray, when her boyfriend, Richard, dumps her for associating with people with AIDS. As she tells Steven, "'You don't understand, he thought he was going to get AIDS from the turkey. Richard and I are deader than Ray'" (254). When Ray gets sick from AIDS, she becomes his caretaker because he has no family or close friends. Where does her selfless energy come from? Like Ray Lee, Margaret's motivations remain unvoiced, her character unplumbed, and her portrayal borders on a stereotype of woman as mother.

       In the context of this discussion of social difference, then, one might be tempted to argue that Monette's strategy for living with AIDS privileges white, affluent, gay men. Afterall, only Mark and Steven obtain the peace of mind about their HIV status that comes from their love relationship and their power to learn to live life in the present. I find this argument simplistic, however, for several reasons. First, unlike many AIDS novels, which focus insularly on particular groups of gay, white men, like Facing It and Second Son, and which consequently privilege the experiences of these groups by leaving unvoiced the experiences of other people living with AIDS, Afterlife does convey the sense of how wide the spectrum is of people affected by AIDS. Second, is it any surprise that those who have the most means, both socially and economically, feel the most empowered to effect changes in their attitudes and lives? From this perspective, Monette's novel implicates the system of privilege with which the society of Los Angeles operates. And yet, not only can rich, white, gay men employ Monette's strategy for living with AIDS. As we have seen, Charlene, "the thirdest world among them," also understands the importance of living life in the present, because as she says, "'Time goin.'"

3.7 From HIV to AIDS: Afterlife to Halfway Home

       As the AIDS epidemic has continued, people have begun to live longer, both with HIV and with AIDS. Where many of the first people diagnosed with AIDS died quite quickly, in 1995, the average span of life for a person from the time of HIV contraction to the time of an AIDS diagnosis is eight years, and this span continues to increase. Additionally, people now diagnosed with full-blown AIDS also live longer than before. Increased knowledge about how HIV affects the immune system has helped people know better how to change their behavior so as to optimize the strength of their immune systems. Additionally, a variety of different drug therapies have been developed to help slow the progression of HIV. A consequence of all of this has been a change in the terminology of AIDS. What used to be broken into different distinct phases (eg., asymptomatic HIV, ARC, full-blown AIDS) now falls under the inclusive phrase, HIV disease. Many recent novels reflect the occurrence of people living longer with HIV disease, including John Berger’s To the Wedding, Steven Corbin’s A Hundred Days From Now, Nisa Donnelly’s The Love Songs of Phoenix Bay, and Dale Peck’s Martin and John, to name just a few. Monette’s novel Afterlife belongs to this group of novels and focuses on characters in the earlier stages of HIV disease.

       Monette’s second AIDS novel, Halfway Home, shifts from a focus on characters with HIV to center on the experiences of a character with full-blown AIDS. A similar shift takes place between David Feinberg’s two AIDS novels, Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion. Both writers were living with HIV disease when they wrote these novels and we might speculate that their personal experiences of living with progressing HIV disease may have influenced the shift in focus of their later novels. The novels by other people who write about AIDS but who themselves do not live with HIV disease, such as Michael Bishop’s Unicorn Mountain, Alice Hoffman’s At Risk and Paul Reed’s Facing It, do not question the cultural narrative that represents AIDS as a death sentence. Unlike these other novels, which tend to represent AIDS apocalyptically, in the case of Halfway Home, AIDS signals neither defeat nor death for Monette.

Halfway Home develops a greater sense of urgency than Afterlife, because unlike most of the characters of Afterlife who are merely HIV+, Tom in Halfway Home has full-blown AIDS and feels sick. He no longer lives in the bustle of the urban life in which the HIV+ characters of Afterlife thrive, but has removed himself to the seclusion and restful quiet of a beach bungalow in Malibu. Halfway Home also develops a greater sense of immediacy than Afterlife because it is told in the first-person from Tom's point of view. Finally, the narrative is in the present tense, which helps add to the sense of urgency of Tom's experience of living day to day with AIDS. The following passage evocatively conveys Tom's daily confrontation with his deteriorating health and communicates Monette's philosophy of life:

Once a day, toward sunset, I walk down the blasted wooden stairs jerry-built into the fold of the cliff, eighty steps to the beach below. At the bottom I sit at the lip of the shallow cave that opens behind the steps, the winter tide churning before me, the foam almost reaching my toes...That's what I'm greedy for more of...[time] which I don't have now. I know it as clear as anything when I turn and climb the eighty steps up. I take it very slow, gripping the rotting banister as I puff my way. This is my daily encounter with what I've lost in stamina. The neuropathy in my left leg throbs with every step. I wheeze and gulp for air. But I also love the challenge, climbing the mountain because it's there, proving every day that the nightmare hasn't won yet.

       The cliff cascades with ice plant, a blanket of gaudy crimson that nearly blinds in the setting sun. The gray terns wheel above me, cheering me on. I feel like I'm claiming a desert island, the first man ever to scale this height. As I reach the top, where a row of century cactus guards the bluff with a hundred swords, I can look back and see a quarter mile down [Malibu's] Trancas Beach, empty and all mine, the rotting sandstone cliffs clean as the end of the world. (23)

Rather than despair, Tom embraces his world with love: the terns, the century cactus, the sandstone cliffs of the beaches of Malibu, and he embraces the challenge of climbing the stairs - the mountain - that in a way symbolize the increasing challenge his life poses for him. He is greedy for more time and he will fight every day to prove "that the nightmare hasn't won yet." But he is not in denial; the nightmare may "yet" win, but it has not won yet. Halfway Home is unlike much other AIDS writing, as Janice Simpson writes of the novel, "...[Monette’s] narrative is not driven 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" (72). Unlike Afterlife, whose narrative portrays several different attitudes toward HIV and AIDS and the struggle to come to terms with one's HIV status, in Halfway Home, Monette focuses on one character, Tom, who has more or less come to terms with his physical condition. If Afterlife is a novel about learning how to live with HIV, then Halfway Home reads like  a novel about someone actually living with AIDS.

3.8 The Narrative Structure of Halfway Home

Halfway Home intensifies many of the themes developed in Afterlife, especially since the main character is dealing with full-blown AIDS rather than just being seropositive. Halfway Home interweaves two main stories. First, it tells the story of the reconciliation of Tom Shaheen with his older brother, Brian, after a lifetime of misunderstandings due to Brian's homophobia and Tom's poor self-esteem. It also tells a second story, which is really a love story, of the developing relationship between Tom and a man named Gray Baldwin. The two story strands come together at the Baldwin Malibu beach bungalow, where Tom has retreated to nurse his failing health.

3.9 The Temporality of Living with AIDS

       Temporality is a central theme in Halfway Home. Every day Tom is confronted by his condition, which signals the passing of time and the deterioration of his body. Because AIDS heightens his awareness of time passing, however, time actually seems to slow down for him. Each moment gathers significance as the time of being alive:

Some mornings you wake up whole. You open your eyes, and the ceiling is swirling with light reflected off the ocean. The bright air pours through the balcony doors like tonic. It's not that you forget for a moment that you're sick. But if you're not in pain, the sheer ballast of being alive simply astonishes...I straddle the stucco balustrade like a pony and drink it all in. The smell of sea pine and eucalyptus wafts around me. I don't want anything but this. (26)

For Tom, “this” represents all that constitutes his experience of being whole and alive in the present moment. Like Steven in Afterlife, who wants no more than to “like like this between the bombs,” Tom wants to fully experience the life available to him in this time between bouts of AIDS-related illnesses. Not only does Tom’s experience of AIDS affect his own perception of time, but his condition also influences the people around him to recognize the passing time of their lives: "I've found that since my illness I can cut right to the chase with my friends, demanding that they jettison the bullshit from their lives. I am like the toller of the bell: my very presence seizes them with how little time is left" (57).

       Monette does not convey the sense that because time is so finite and so fleeting, a person should simply “seize the day” and be happy at each moment. His philosophy for living in time is a more provisional one. Like Mark’s father, Rob, in Afterlife, another elderly person articulates Monette’s philosophy of life in Halfway Home. When she congratulates Tom for his developing relationship with Gray, ninety-year-old Foo, Gray’s great-aunt, stresses both the importance of one’s love-life and, just as importantly, the understanding that one’s life in time cannot always be happy:

"Let me tell you something, Tom. Lasting's the least of it. Lasting is all I've done for fifteen years." She puffed out her lips with contempt, making a sound like pish. She looked out at the water, whose shifting sapphire had been her’s longer than anybody's. "Not that I don't have nice days, mind you," she added judiciously. And I realized it was just what I'd said to Daniel, the same provisional wisdom. Happy was for birthdays...Then she looked at me again, exquisitely calm in her lounging posture, ancient but not old. "So, if you can walk on air and be boys for a while...well, that's the secret, isn't it?" (207)

Where AIDS has heightened Tom’s sense of time, old age has influenced Foo’s. Like Tom, Foo recognizes that the time of her life is passing, but for her, time has stretched out over many years, as she says, “‘Lasting is all I’ve done for fifteen years.’” In both cases, however, they share the “same provisional wisdom” - that one’s life has moments of happiness and that the secret is to be happy, to “walk on air,” in those moments that last only “for a while.”

3.10 Tom Shaheen’s Life as Performance Artist

       Before Tom retired to the restful quiet of the Malibu beach bungalow, he lived in West Los Angeles and led the life of a performance artist. Twice during the course of Halfway Home, he returns to the stage of AGORA, a radical performance theatre, as Miss Jesus. Tom describes AGORA as "... our fiesty open space in Venice that we reclaimed from a ball-point pen factory, famous throughout the netherworld of Performance, with its own FBI file to boot" (5). As Miss Jesus, Tom exaggerates the effeminate aspects of his personality in order to inflame his audience. As H. Stephen Kaye describes Tom, "The character is an in-your-face Los Angeles performance artist - probably inspired by celebrated Jesse Helms target and NEA reject Tim Miller - whose claim to fame is a portrayal of Jesus as a sadomasochistic drag queen" (313). The first performance of Miss Jesus takes place at the beginning of the novel, and Tom describes his effeminate, on-stage behavior: “As a sort of warm-up I strike a set of poses, limp-wristed and mincing, flouncing my golden hair, shivering with sissiness. All right, it’s self-indulgent, but it gets across the persona with swift economy: this boy is a queen” (45). Unlike Afterlife with its masculine protagonist, Steven, and with its problematic portrayal of Ray as an effeminate, Asian-American, gay man, Halfway Home depicts Tom’s effeminacy as a source of power, and he is often as much a queen off-stage as he is on. Monette portrays Tom as a queen whose effeminacy heightens his emotional sensitivity and depth.

       The second time Tom performs Miss Jesus is in the closing portion of the novel, and this will most likely be his last performance of Miss Jesus, since his AIDS is progressing. This time, his performance reveals how much he has changed through the course of the novel:

It's myself I can't shock anymore. The naughty boy has lost the thrill of flashing his dick in church. Though I feel no special overwhelm of regret, I'm glad it didn't happen any sooner, or else there might never have been a Miss Jesus at all. Besides, I didn't require a whole life of being happy. I like it this way, dancing behind the end credits. (259)

Like Andy in Facing It, whose political activism stemmed in part from the homophobia of his upbringing, Tom’s life as an artist had been fueled by the emotional damage of his childhood. Now, however, Tom is no longer tormented by his childhood with its incestuous and abusive relationship with his older brother, Brian, and with its Catholic hypocrisy. Where Reed portrays Andy’s AIDS-related illnesses infecting Andy’s life and preventing him from his career as an activist, Monette depicts Tom voluntarily relinquishing his career as a performance artist in order to focus on other aspects of his life, and Halfway Home ends with Tom happy and in love. For Halfway Home, AIDS signals neither the end of the novel nor the end of Tom’s life.

3.11 Tom’s Love-Life, Living Life     

       Though Halfway Home differs from Afterlife in its depiction of a protagonist with full-blown AIDS, there are many similarities between the love plots of the two novels. The novels open with Steven and Tom feeling a lack in their lives, though Halfway Home's first-person, present tense form conveys more urgency. Like Afterlife, Halfway Home continues to communicate Monette's philosophy of life - that the only reason it is worth living is because of love. I concur with Sharon Warner when she says, “...love is a subject Monette knows more about than any other contemporary writer I can think of" (497). Monette doesn't depict gay relationships any differently from straight ones. Indeed, as Kaufman writes, "Probably more than any other writer, Monette has demonstrated just how conventional or mainstream gay relationships can be - even in the midst of the AIDS epidemic" (22). Tom’s growing relationship with Gray illustrates Kaufman’s point.

       Tom first met Gray through his involvement with performance art. About Gray, Tom says, "He's spent most of his life giving away his share [of his inheritance], a sort of patron saint of the avant-garde" (8). The novel opens with their friendship beginning to shift from the uneasy intimacy of a gay friendship to the growing depth of a romantic involvement:

Through the winter Gray and I have grown tighter, like roommates except we live in different Baldwin houses. Yet there's always been a line we never cross, the no-man's-land where you walk on eggs. I usually chalk it up to my illness, or to Gray's unfailing reserve and discretion. Tonight there's no line. (41)

Though Gray is not overly demonstrative of his feelings, the novel communicates his quiet and understated affection for Tom as well as the positive, life-enhancing effect this has on Tom:

Who knows what deep Presbyterian springs prohibit him from being stroked? "I'm just glad you're around," he says, ignoring the encomium. "Gives the place some life."

   "Wait, I think you got it backwards. I'm a dying man." But I say so with perfect jauntiness, and we both laugh. I don't feel dying at all right now. (39)

When Tom finally begins to connect with Gray, like Steven and Mark in Afterlife, he feels a rebirth of what he thought were doomed feelings: "When we opened our mouths at last to drink each other in, it was astonishment rather than passion shivering in me. I never expected another chance. I'd shut this part of me down for good, like a summer house, the day they told me my antibody status" (146).

       Though Tom develops a loving relationship with Gray, love does not stop his AIDS. During one of the climax chapters of the novel, Tom has a seizure and must spend the night in the hospital after having had a spinal tap. As Tom is wheeled into the hospital room, getting ready for the spinal tap, he realizes the trap that love has set for him:

I used to swear I'd end it all before they'd ever check me in, my small final protest against the stealing of the real Tom...But I hadn't done it, had I? I'd walked in here on my own power, freely giving up my name and self. And all because I'd been ambushed by love, and would do anything now to squeak through. (186)

The next day, when he returns home with Gray, sex becomes a way for him to reaffirm life: "I needed the bond to be physical, to gorge on him, if that pinprick above my coccyx was ever going to stop feeling like the first kiss of dying. I growled and sucked, holding his ballsack tight in my fist" (202).

       Monette's two AIDS novels do not merely allude to the love among men living with HIV disease but graphically depict what that love entails, namely, sex. In Afterlife, Dell feasts on 976 numbers, Sonny snorts crystal and picks up guys, and Steven falls in love and rediscovers his sexuality; in Halfway Home, Monette shows Tom having sex with Gray. His two AIDS novels are quite unique in their celebration and representation of the sexuality of people living with HIV and with AIDS. Unlike Facing It and so many of the AIDS novels that are conflicted about gay sexuality because of its association with death, Halfway Home presents gay sex as life-confirming. As Tom thinks while deep-throating Gray, "One thing I knew with every swallow: nobody sucked like this in the grave" (203). Monette challenges us not only to imagine Tom, who has full-blown AIDS, making love with Gray but he also challenges us to imagine that love as a celebration of life, love and sexuality.

3.12 Family Life in Halfway Home

       Besides the love story, the second interwoven plot of the novel consists of Tom's reconciliation with his estranged brother, Brian, and Tom's chance to develop a relationship with his nephew, Daniel. When Brian, his wife, Susan, and their son, Daniel, suddenly show up at the Malibu beach bungalow, the juxtaposition of this traditional family unit (of genetic ties) with the alternative family structure at the beach house (bonded by love, respect and friendship) becomes a way for Monette to compare and contrast straight families with alternative ones. As Kaufman writes, "...we're offered a sharp contrast [in Halfway Home] between the all-American nuclear family and the more extended kind that, for many, has replaced it" (24). Like Afterlife's depiction of the "family" composed of Steven and his circle of friends, Halfway Home portrays a similarly non-traditional family structure, with Tom sharing his life at the beach bungalow with Gray, Gray's great-aunt Foo, and Tom's lesbian friend, Mona. The alternative families that Monette portrays in his two AIDS novels, like those in other recent novels such as Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World, are what Kaufman has aptly described as "part of a literary movement that testifies that nothing less than a new definition of the American family is in order, one that is more dynamic and capacious, more cognizant of the extended possibilities that have already permeated society" (21).

       The alternative family in Halfway Home results in part from homophobia and AIDS. Tom’s biological family rejected him twenty years earlier because of his homosexuality, and more recently, AIDS has killed most of his close friends. About Mona and Gray, Tom says, "The two of them have come to be my most immediate family, somewhat by elimination, my friends all having died, but I couldn't have chosen better" (10). Unlike the easy complacency that often springs from genetic ties, the creation and maintenance of their family requires effort and action. Tom acts as a kind of matchmaker to help Mona and Gray to become friends and members of a family chosen rather than given. Tom consciously considers how their attributes will contribute to the family he is constructing: "They'll be good for each other, so opposite in every way" (10). Besides his developing intimacy with Gray, Tom feels a deep closeness and comfortable intimacy with Mona, his partner in AGORA. Early in the novel, he describes their easy intimacy: "We sit there slumped against each other, watching the fire, not needing to talk. I love the smoky elusiveness of Mona's perfume, a scent she swears is the very same Dietrich wears, a beauty tip passed in whispers through the shadowy dyke underground" (6-7). When Tom discovers that Gray’s great-aunt Foo is still alive and that she is a warm and interesting person, he gladly welcomes her into his family. Foo feels more like a grandparent to Tom than did his biological grandparent: "The only grandparent I ever had was my dad's dad, by then a shell in a wheelchair, spewing hate and ethnic slurs at everything that moved. Foo was like getting a second chance - finally, one's own kind" (71).

       The arrival of Brian and his traditional family at the Malibu beach home offers Tom the opportunity to learn how different the two families are. In contrast to his carefully evolving relationship with Gray, Brian and Susan seem to squander and sabotage their marriage with abusive behavior:

The relationship we were struggling to begin didn't seem half so crazy now, compared to the competition. And I saw clearer than ever how the abuse had come down like a wayward gene from my father to Brian. It wasn't just an adolescent's meanness, mauling his baby brother. He had this well of violence in him, and so did his wife, and they danced a constant tango of taunt and explosion. Coldly I wondered which of them hit the kid. (122)

If the love plot is a process of expansion and growth, this plot is a process of uncovering. The layers of past secrets and repressed memories and feelings are progressively stripped away to leave Tom seeing for the first time with crystal clarity the intimate bonds that connect him with his brother and his brother’s family. Through the course of the novel, Tom confronts the homophobic bigotry of Susan, Brian's violence toward Susan and their son, Daniel, and his own repressed memories of his father's violence toward himself and of Brian's incestuous behavior with him. Ultimately, after Susan has abandoned the beach bungalow, taking Daniel with her, Brian is left needy, his family gone except for Tom. Tom recognizes the significance of this instant, as his older brother turns to him:

I hadn't forgotten his own Jekyll-and-Hyde. All of that still waited to be wrestled and cursed and exorcised. But here was my brother turning to me. In the quick of our fumbling clasp, something wrong that went to the core of the planet - a fissure that leaked molten rock and brimstone - knitted at last and healed. (160-1)

Though the novel ends with Brian separated from his wife and child, his relationship to Tom, which had been suspended in an icey silence for twenty years, has finally been warmed and returned to life.

       Unlike the romance plot, this plot of Halfway Home has been accused by some reviewers as being "too Hollywood" - too staged. The course of this plot line does sound contrived: the initial appearance of Brian at the beach home, hinting of his questionable business partnership with his old highschool buddy, Jerry Curran; the subsequent fire-bombing of his home and the discovery of three charred bodies; the sudden appearance of Brian and his family at the beach home with the explanation that the three people dead were actually their live-in house-help, a Vietnamese family; much later, Brian’s decision to work with the FBI to expose Jerry in exchange for clemency; Jerry’s sudden gun-wielding appearance at the beach home; Tom’s coming to his brother’s rescue; Jerry’s panicking because of Tom’s AIDS, and Jerry ending up fatally shot. An enumeration of these events makes the novel sound like a newsstand thriller, however, it does not convey a complete sense of the novel. Though Monette uses these events to provide a frame for the family plot, within the course of the narrative, Monette pursues much more than a simple, plot-driven story.

       Besides telling a story of Tom’s reconciliation with his long-lost brother, the family plot in Halfway Home enables Monette to work with a theme missing from Afterlife, namely the most important aspect of traditional, biological family structures. It is through having children that people have traditionally sought to help offset the mortal trajectory of their life in time. In Halfway Home, Tom comes to realize how significant a figure Daniel, his seven-year-old nephew, is to him. Not only is Daniel important to Tom in terms of inherited traits, since Tom sees so many similarities in their personalities, but also in terms of Daniel's position in a different generation of their family history. Toward the end of the novel, Tom embraces this idea when he thinks of Daniel:

Now all I wanted was a little time, one last walk with him on the beach at sunset, so as to sink the memory of me deeper. Fifty years from now, when Gray was gone and Brian - all of us - Daniel would be the only thing left of me. Believing nothing else, I found myself longing for that small immortality. (191)

Though Tom’s alternative family will continue to remember him after he dies, they do not span generations of time into the future as represented by this child.

3.13 The Humor of Halfway Home

       Besides Monette’s use of plot, another important aspect of Halfway Home as well as of his other AIDS writing is his use of humor. At the beginning of the novel, Tom refers to his AIDS in a casual, tongue-in-cheek manner: “I've been at this thing for a year and a half, three if you count all the fevers and rashes. I operate on the casual assumption that I've still got a couple of years, give or take a galloping lymphoma. Day to day I'm not a dying man, honestly” (4). Tom’s manner of speaking about AIDS does not work if the reader does not pick up on it as a form of black humor. As David Feinberg has noted in his provocative essay, “AIDS and Humor,” “Failed humor trivializes tragedy and offends the reader...” (88). The way in which Monette interweaves the topic of AIDS with a kind of black humor (or perhaps a kind of gallow’s humor) has been one of the criticisms his novel has received, especially when conjoined with his use of romance plots - the implication being that because he strays from realism, he has not treated AIDS seriously enough (Roman 279). Especially in Halfway Home, however, it is this sense of dark humor that helps make Tom's experience of AIDS more bearable.

       In the important point in the novel when Tom must be hospitalized because of his AIDS, he and Gray encounter another PLWA, his old acquaintance, Ed Bernardo. Tom’s initial reaction to seeing Ed so sick with AIDS is one of horror: "he looked just like everyone else before the end" (185). Unlike Reed’s portrayal of Andy focusing on the horror of Patrick’s AIDS in Facing It, and very much unlike his portrayal of the three widowers glumly observing the spectre of Ray Lee’s AIDS during the Thanksgiving dinner in Afterlife, Monette here does not portray his characters with AIDS dwelling on their AIDS as presaging apocalyptic doom. Indeed, they begin to laugh at their circumstances:

But Ed somehow segued from coughing to laughing, practically holding his sides with mirth, or trying to keep his tubes in. "Tom," he gasped, "I heard you were dead!"

   Oh it was priceless, how black the humor could get. I gave out a chortle in response, and then the three of us were whinnying merrily at the absurdity of keeping track of who was still alive. When in doubt - no Christmas cards two years running - assume the worst. And as for the gray areas, the half-dead, look at Ed Bernardo, for Chrissakes. Was I really so sick I could laugh at that? The fifty pounds he'd shed, the straggle of thirteen hairs on his head, where he used to sport a ponytail. His mottled face, at once gray as a dead fish and weirdly ruddy, as if he'd stood downwind of a hydrogen bomb. Yet we laughed like kids in a graveyard. (185).

By laughing in the face of apocalypse, Tom and Ed cope with their AIDS. As Feinberg says, “In an absurd world, humor may be the only appropriate response” (87). Humor becomes a way to make AIDS feel more manageable, as Feinberg notes, “Once you joke about something, you appropriate it, you attain a certain amount of control over it” (87). In Halfway Home, humor provides an important coping strategy for Tom so that he can live with his AIDS.

       The climax of the family plot culminates in a stand-off, rife with humorous melodrama, between the armed and dangerous, Jerry Curran, and the bare-chested, Kaposi Sarcoma-covered Tom. Indeed, I find this scene both reflects and merits David Roman’s praise of the novel, that “the elements of fantasy and melodrama are ironic and add to the reader’s overall experience of the novel” (279). Tom walks into the living room of the beach house to find his brother, Brian, cornered by Tom’s childhood bully and the rampant homophobe, Jerry. At first, Jerry does not notice Tom’s body, and as he turns the gun on Tom, he proceeds to hurl homophobic taunts at him. Then, he suddenly perceives Tom’s body:

The gun still pointed, ready to blow my brains out, but now his nervous eyes were everywhere. The lesion on my shoulder, the one by my left nipple, the double one on my thigh... "Don't worry, I won't sneeze on you," I declare, but not even trying to conceal the exhiliration of having shocked him. "Though if you're planning to use that" - I nodded toward the gun, a foot away and trembling slightly - I can't swear I won't bleed. I don't suppose you brought a rubber suit." (229)

When Jerry is then distracted by the appearance of Gray entering the living room, Tom jumps at the chance and bites Jerry’s hand. Monette then sardonically notes Jerry’s reaction: “His shout was a horror of being infected, rather than rage, so he panicked and flailed when he should have gone for the kill” (231). At this instant, Jerry is then fatally shot. In this scene, the melodrama of a Hollywood-style showdown between the bad guys and the good guys comes together with AIDSphobia and with the black humor of a person living with AIDS to resolve this plot line.

3.13        Resisting the End

       By the end of the novel, Tom has reconciled with his brother, gained a nephew and has begun his relationship with Gray. Even though it is clear that his AIDS is progressing and that his time is finite, indeed, that he may only have a summer left, Tom continues to resist the apocalypse AIDS threatens. The narrative itself reflects his philosophy of life. The novel does not end in closure or even at a stable resting place, but in the "middest" (to borrow Frank Kermode's phrase), ending on the brink of summer. The last passage of the novel wonderfully conveys Monette's attitude toward love, life and time. As Gray drives the old pick-up truck back out to Malibu with Tom's head resting on his lap, Gray says to Tom, "'You ready for a little summer?' he asks. I laugh, rocking in his lap as he hangs a sharp left and makes for the beach. 'Oh yes indeed,' I tell him. Home is the place you get to, not the place you came from. 'Haven't I told you? Summer's my middle name'" (262). This concluding passage explicitly articulates one of the main themes of the novel, namely that "home is the place you get to, not the place you came from." And implicitly, this last passage enacts Monette's philosophy of life, that what matters in life isn't one's end but the process of one's living. Steadfastly refusing closure or even a resting place, the novel ends in the "middest" - on the cusp of summer, in the middle of a conversation, and in a car that is driving home.

3.14 In Retrospect

       Having now considered both Afterlife and Halfway Home, we might be tempted to ask which is the better novel. There is some disagreement among the critics about how to evaluate the two novels and much of the disagreement seems to be a matter of personal taste. Jesse Monteagudo has said, “Afterlife is the greatest novel ever written about AIDS” (6), and yet other critics have preferred Halfway Home. For example, David Kaufman writes,

A tendency in Afterlife to veer in too many directions at once is surmounted in Halfway Home. As realized in the final pages, Tom's touching reconciliation with Brian is like a magnet that draws all other elements of the narrative into a culminating perspective on families, from the ones that chose us to the ones we choose. (24)

The basis for many of the complaints against Halfway Home is the issue of how to evaluate Monette’s use of plot. H. Stephen Kaye writes, "The plot continues as an odd mixture of Hollywood police drama and gay male fantasies fulfilled...overblown [and] sometimes implausible" (313). Marv Shaw finds the plot’s lack of realism problematic: "... the departures from probability weaken the book" (30). Janice Simpson complains that Monette “indulges in a fondness for melodrama that results in a climactic shoot-out and several teary reconciliations" (72). Kaufman, on the other hand, is more sympathetic to Monette’s use of plot: "While there is still too much reliance on plot...such a drawback is compensated for not only by hip expression but also by an economy of theme" (24). In his review of Monette’s critics, David Roman says that the critics just do not understand Monette: “Most critics, regardless of their venue or sexual orientation, generally fail to comment on Monette's gift for manipulating such popular forms as romance, melodrama, and irony” (279). I would have to agree with Roman’s assessment. Monette capably interweaves these different popular forms to write novels about AIDS that manage ultimately to achieve a difficult balance, neither becoming too sentimental nor too tragic. Halfway Home proves a more successful novel to me when compared with Afterlife, several of whose characters I have found problematic. The risk with Halfway Home, however, is that its depiction of the AIDS epidemic is not as inclusive as Afterlife’s, since its cast of characters and range of locations is much smaller, which by omission may privilege the experiences of white, gay men with AIDS.

       The demographics of the AIDS epidemic have been steadily changing as white, gay men with AIDS have died and as AIDS has moved into minority populations, especially those of Black Americans and the urban poor. Strangely enough, novels that describe the experiences of gay men with AIDS have now been accepted by mainstream publishing houses. As Kaufman sardonically notes, “It is a matter of supreme irony that gay men should be coming to life in such numbers on the page, assimilated into mainstream publishing, just as we are dying in such numbers on the street” (25). Paul Monette is no exception. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story earned wide mainstream praise and received a national book award. This book completes Monette’s life story, which he had first begun in Borrowed Time, and it recalls his childhood and early adult years before meeting Roger Horowiz. The last volume Monette published before his death was a collection of autobiographical essays, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise, which describes aspects of his most recent experiences of living with AIDS.

       Perhaps it is no surprise that Monette moved away from fiction in his final years, as AIDS began increasingly to take its toll on his body. His last works seem a fitting completion to his life as a writer. In the last interview he gave before his death, Monette explains the importance of Becoming a Man to his mission as a gay writer: “If my life has been useful enough to help people understand that they’re not alone, then I know those people will go off and help others. That’s how we will change the world” (59). About his AIDS writing, Monette said, “It would give me great satisfaction to die knowing that mine was a kind of first voice telling the story of what AIDS did to us...” (62). When AIDS finally prevented him from serving his duty as a writer, he gave up. In the preface to his interview with Monettee, Bohdan Zachary noted how closely writing and life were aligned for Monette: “Unwilling to go on if he could no longer write, Monette stopped his medication and prepared to die” (60). Though February 10, 1995, marked the silencing of one of the most vibrant voices to have spoken out about AIDS, the writing Monette has left behind continues to speak and to live.

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Notes

[1]. Roman's criticisms of reviewers for "mainstream" publications may also reflect his allegiance to the gay audience he addresses. As he writes, "Many of these reviewers proclaim, for example, that these novels 'transcend the label of gay novel' suggesting that there may be something inherently negative in such an identification" (279).

[2]. Roman's politicized stance also leads him to criticize reviewers for gay publications and what he sees as their essentialist positions about gay men:  these particular critics "complain that the novels are not realistic enough, suggesting on their part a bias for gay male representations that can be grounded only in the 'real' experiences of gay men in contemporary society" (279).

[3]. Counterimmersive AIDS writing, Cady feels, may evolve from "a lingering depression about homosexuality and in stereotyped understandings of it" (258), and oftentimes, it relies on a "...significant degree of obedience to the dominant culture..." (260).

[4]. Though I find Cady's distinction between "immersive" and "counterimmersive" AIDS writing a useful one to describe trends in the larger field of AIDS literature, I might be tempted to argue that when the category of "immersive" AIDS writing is applied to novels about AIDS, it runs into problems. Indeed, I would argue that all too often, "immersive" AIDS writing in novels may merely lead to a reenactment of the dominant cultural narrative about AIDS, which robs agency from those living with it, by insisting that AIDS=death. I do not so much disagree with Cady's distinction, but find that it needs to be nuanced with respect to novels about AIDS.

[5]. In Erotic Welfare, Linda Singer develops the idea of an "epidemic logic," a particular dynamic process, which she argues helps explain both cultural and regulatory practices the United States has developed, in particular, to deal with the AIDS epidemic. She writes,

Epidemic logic depends on certain structuring contraditions, proliferating what it seeks to contain, producing what it regulates...[It] depends upon the perpetual revival of an anxiety it seeks to control, inciting a crisis of contagion that spreads to ever new sectors of cultural life, which, in turn, justify and necessitate specific regulatory apparatus which then compensate - materially and symbolically - for the crisis it has produced. (29)

I suppose one way to describe what I am trying to articulate would be a "narrative logic" of AIDS, which in the AIDS novels generates particular plot structures that work to proliferate and reiterate the dominant cultural narrative that insists AIDS=death. From this perspective, Monette's two AIDS novels can be read as struggling to resist this "narrative logic" of AIDS in order to develop alternative ways to plot AIDS.

[6]. Other critics have noted Monette's emphasis on the importance of love, including Sharon Warner and Jesse Monteagudo. As Monteagudo says, "In the end, Monette and his characters seem to agree with Michael Callen (another survivor) that love is all that matters, if only because love is all we have" (6). Unfortunately, neither Callen nor Monette has survived AIDS.

[7]. It is interesting to note that reviewers of Afterlife tend to pick one plot strand to focus on rather than acknowledge all three, and this leads them to particular conclusions about the novel's overall effect. For example, Sybil Steinberg finds the novel, "sad and moving," whereas Christopher Davis says that, in Afterlife, "Monette seems to equate a positive HIV test with a death sentence" (21). My reading of the novel counters both these  conclusions.

[8]. In contrast to Afterlife and its textured depiction of urban life, Facing It, for example, focuses on an elite group of white characters, and, though the action of the novel transpires in New York City and San Francisco, neither these cities nor their general inhabitants are portrayed in the novel. Other examples include Robert Ferro’s Second Son, Clayton Graham’s Tweeds and Paul Redon’s Bloodstream. See the Annotated Bibliography for more examples of the insular groups that most of the AIDS novels represent.

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Lisa Garmire's Home Page

Resisting the Apocalypse: Telling Time in American Novels about AIDS, 1982-1992"
(UCSB English Department Doctoral Dissertation 1996, Lisa Garmire)

• Chapter 1: AIDS Novels in Context
• Chapter 1: Works Cited
• Chapter 2: The Apocalyptic AIDS Novel: Facing It: A Novel of AIDS
• Chapter 2: Works Cited
• Chapter 3: Resisting the Apocalypse: David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion
• Chapter 3: Works Cited
• Chapter 4: Borrowing Time in Paul Monette's Afterlife and Halfway Home
• Chapter 4: Works Cited
• Chapter 5: Silent Apocalypse: Race, Class, Gender, Heterosexual AIDS
• Chapter 5: Works Cited
• Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of AIDS Novels, 1982-1992
• Selected Bibliography of AIDS Novels 1993+