Walking on Air

Jones, a publishing insider (he's a HarperCollins editor) got some excellent reviews for his first novel, Force of Gravity, four years ago, and his second shows the same ability to create an odd, obsessive world. William Addams (he insists on the second `d' to emphasize his estrangement from his California family) is dying of AIDS in New York--and it is one of the book's oddities that his disease is never specified, although it could hardly be anything else. Terrified of perishing alone, yet severe, prickly and fiercely independent, William relies entirely on two friends who subsume their own lives and interests in an effort to help him: Henry, a rather vague, ineffectual teacher who was briefly William's lover, and Susan, a successful real estate saleswoman who is declining into lonely spinsterhood and largely sublimates her thwarted sexual energies in caring for William. William's terror at the hideous encroachments of his disease is the source of the book's greatest power; the sheer physical horror of human disintegration is graphically depicted in rare and unsparing detail. The little tugs-of-war among the three protagonists as William alternately asserts his independence and his needs, the flickering levels of caring and resentment in Henry and Susan, are skillfully evoked but are, alas, more familiar from other AIDS chronicles. The relationships seem oddly airless, and the apocalyptic climax is jarring. Jones's writing, however, is always vital and precise, and he achieves many memorable moments of horror and compassion. Author tour. (Oct.)