Playful, wry and tinged with melancholy, this promising debut collection of 16 short stories nimbly sidesteps the tropes of gay fiction. Though Alvarez's prose is uneven, slipping back and forth from cunningly styled to stilted, his themes and characterizations are intelligent and sophisticated. Most of the stories are linked, chronicling the ups and downs of Mark and Dean, a couple with a long history. Set up by friends, they suffer through a disastrous blind date, then meet again two years later at their friends' wedding, in "Public Displays of Affection." Their courtship is detailed in the prose-poem "Ephemera" ("I like this very much./When exactly do you know you're in love?/
Me too.") When Dean discovers he is HIV positive, he leaves Mark without explaining why, and is confronted by a straight colleague of Mark's in the touching "Other People's Complications." Mark, a former pop star and a successful record producer, heads to his mother's house in "Heat Rises," holing up in the attic for months with a stash of recording equipment, emerging with a piece of music that he claims replicates the sound of his soul. Mark and Dean are eventually reunited, and one of the funniest stories in the book ("Property Values") takes place in Puerto Rico, where they move so Dean can spend his last years where he grew up. Told from the point of view of a real estate broker who is horrified to find that her clients are gay, it ends with her hilarious comeuppance. Unrelated stories tend to be more experimental. In "Rog and Venus Become an Item," the adult protagonist is still attached to his placenta, which he carries around in a briefcase; "A Small Indulgence" is set in a curiously bland heaven. These are thoughtful, ambitious tales, cleverly imagined if not always flawlessly executed. (Sept.)
