Diary of a Lost Boy

by Harry Kondoleon

Alfred A. Knopf

$20.00

183 pp

One way of looking at fiction, Josephine Humphreys wrote once, is to look at it as the writer trying to answer a question. Considered in this way. Harry Kondoleon's new novel,Diary of a Lost Boy, makes quite clear from the get-go what its question will be. Can Hector Diaz, his narrator, detach himself from his impending death from AIDS so that he may live for now, so that the marital problems of his best friends, are as important to him as his own death? And on the heels of that, there is another question, one which we may pose: can we detach this novel, which follows Hector's progress toward his death, from Mr. Kondoleon's own, in light of the fact that the author moved from HIV positive status to "full-blown" AIDS four years ago?

Hector's character is as funny a modern storyteller as anyone else out there, but despite the comic, light tone of his observation of the disease (thereby seeming to achieve some sort of detachment from the particularly unfunny topic he is addressing), his humor cannot disengage him from his death. It will come whether he is funny or not.

Hector has two years to live; his friends the Deds are about to lose their marriage. As Hector begins his story, he asks us to forgive him if we've hard it before. And surely we have heard stories of the disease creeping in, at first slowly but soon faster and faster, at first unassuming but soon dominating and disfiguring. Too, we have heard of happy marriages breaking apart.

Susan Ded is Hector's best friend, a college friend who calls him "darling" and has strong opinions, though love's treatment of her has made her opinions "less vivid." The story belonging to the Deds and the story belonging to Hector move along at roughly the same speed, and as Bill Ded hires prostitutes to call him dirty names, Hector loses weight; as Susan moves toward alcoholism, Hector is hospitalized.

"Death arrives like a pig in a blanket, like a carrot in a pot," says Hector, "salted, salted." Which might make you think that he's not taking the experience very seriously. He is not, however, without fear or selfpity. What makes his experience visible to the reader is that he does not demonstrate his lack of denial, as he says, by non-stop screaming. AIDS leaves him quite clearly a human being, as it does in fact to all of those who contract it, and because we have not known Hector previously, the story is new, we have not in fact heard it before. In this sense he may well achieve in some way the detachment he at first says he cannot: he is not the disease, he must not be reduced to a personification of AIDS. This is the way that the American public has distanced itself from the disease--a Haitian disease, a gay disease, an immoral and marginal disease, a disease that doesn't happen to anyone it knows--but Hector's narrative is personal and human. It is hard not to like him, or at least not to feel something for and about him.

What makes Mr. Kondoleon's novel the success that it is his ability to reveal Hector to us, even though Hector is in the process of losing himself. Any points Mr. Kondoleon has to make about 'life in the age of AIDS," as book jackets and television shows like to call the time we live in are gently submerged within Hector's character. The comedy of the novel is gently submerged as well within its obvious tragedy, but the submersion is so delicate that the tragedy at times seems to fade. But while Hector does manage to transform "peace of God" into "pizza of God," somewhere amid the IV sacks and experimental treatments he loses the pizza as well. His humor, an arm against fear, will not protect him, and although he dreams or perhaps even sees the Deds ultimately walking arm in arm, he will die. He is attached to death.

What the novel must avoid is the opposite of the dehumanization of the victim of AIDS. The other characters in Diary of a Lost Boyare reduced almost to satire, in their names (the Deds, the magazine editor Mag, Bill's girlfriend Shush, for instance) and in their banality (Mag calls to tell Hecetor that her assistant Joseph has died from the disease, but that she doesn't see it as just "a lot of rotten luck," but "as a doorway into the New Age"). But if the cast surrounding Hector approaches satire, it is perhaps as his situation dictates. They are all around him, and they are with him, but not for long. Only his death will remain, and it only will have any substance. In this sense they can only be hollow.

It is not, however, that Mr. Kondoleon's humor becomes wholly ironic. The comedy moves alongside the tragedy, and the tenuous relation of the two generally manages to avoid seeming bitter or sarcastic. One does not necessarily override the other Death is not funny, maybe, but Hector certainly is. And while death is surely present in the novel, we are detached from it to some extent. We are busy listening to Hector.