Rat Bohemia: 9

Parental abandonment is the theme of this dreary tale of gay and lesbian life on the edge in New York City. Rita Mae Weems, whose father kicked her out at the age of 16, still hears the disappointment in his voice when she phones him years later. She works as a rat exterminator for the city's Department of Health, and everywhere she looks she sees decay and vermin, both human and animal. Her friend David, a young writer dying of AIDS, spends his last months mourning his dead lover and his dead friends and meditating on why his parents hate him. Pondering the narrow boundaries of parental love, he observes that ``they're glad we're dying... really they're relieved.'' Killer, their chronically unemployed friend, is more philosophical, if also more simplistic. ``We're bohemians,'' she says proudly. ``We don't have those dominant cultural values.'' Indeed, these three would refuse to fit into the mainstream, even if the mainstream were generous. And they're united in their scorn of Muriel Kay Starr, a lesbian writer who ``moved to another neighborhood and got closer to power'' and wrote a closeted novel called Good and Bad, in which they (David, Killer and Rita) appear as characters. For no apparent reason, Schulman (Empathy) tacks on, as an ``appendix,'' the first four chapters of Good and Bad. Very little binds this ``appendix'' to the four other sections that comprise the novel; in fact, very little, other than the presence of the principal characters and a theme of resentment of parents, binds the other four sections to each other. Only the dying David, ironically, seems alive, animated by his rage at his impending death. His loneliness and eloquent anguish only partially salvage this meandering tale of a city so befouled that it leaves the reader wishing for a bath. (Oct.)