EIGHTY-SIXED

A flat, overlong first novel that chronicles gay life in NYC before and after AIDS: in place of emotion, insight, and plot, it offers sentimentality, cliches, and the death of a thinly individuated AIDS victim.

In 1980, NYU grad student B.J. Rosenthal is gay, Jewish, and looking for love. In his (initially amusing, soon tiring) chatty, catty, camp, and precious voice, we hear about the baths, working out at the gym, cruising the West Village bars, and a few explicit sexual encounters. This first section of the book, "Ancient History," presents the carefree life before the plague, when the clap and herpes were the worst that could happen. The second section, "Learning To Cry," set in 1986, has at its center the slow death of Bob Broome, an AIDS victim with whom B.J. once slept, and B.J.'s attempt to cope with his emotions. It's hard to care though, because, with the exception of the gay priest, B.J.'s friends are barely distinguishable from each other, and B.J. seems not to care about Bob (visiting the hospital everyday, he's more concerned for himself). Feinberg lists, rather than evokes, life in Manhattan, so—though Villagers will immediately recognize everything—outlanders will be buried in a flurry of meaningless names. Likewise, dialogue consists of once-trendy jokes and catch-phrases, regurgitated current events (John LennonTylenolChallengerContragate), and characters telling each other things they both already know, squeezing facts about AIDS in among the tired one-liners.

An arresting first sentence, but otherwise without creativity or invention.