cover image All We Know of Heaven

All We Know of Heaven

Anna Tuttle Villegas. St. Martin's Press, $19.95 (208pp) ISBN 978-0-312-14613-9

In this artfully written but somewhat manipulative first novel, Villegas sets out to explore the very modern country of living (and loving) with AIDS. Dolores Meredith, realtor in a small Northern California town, poet manque and part-time creative writing teacher, finally sells the Leland House--a gorgeous but dilapidated Queen Anne relic that she adores--to Austin Barclay, a successful lawyer newly returned from New York to teach and mellow. Inevitably, they become involved, fall in love and renovate together--and then their love is tested. Austin learns he is HIV positive, and Dolores must decide whether to walk away or stay with him to the bitter end. Because the story is so simple and predictable, the pleasure of the text is found in the style. Each chapter begins with a poem by Emily Dickinson, which serves as the impetus for a prose meditation on a certain aspect of love. Villegas's voice is charmingly mannered (an echo of the poet) but never attains Dickinson's unblinking vision of life. The character Jorge, Dolores' six year old barrio poetry student, for example, is endowed with a very real sweet intelligence but not the streetwise flip side. Such patronizing characterization isn't limited to Jorge. The very fairy tale-like delicacy of the writing and the glossy portraits of even minor characters is in some ways an insult to the rough world the writer observes but does not really inhabit. Villegas has written a poignant phrasebook that easily calls forth tears, but she hasn't captured the emotional complexity that comes with living--with or without illness and tragedy. First serial rights to Good Housekeeping; audio rights to Brilliance Audio. (Feb.) FYI: In another of those publishing coincidences, this book bears the same title as one by Sue Ellen Bridgers, reviewed Sept. 9.