Diary of a Lost Boy

Slowly dying of AIDS and told by his doctor that he has at most two years to live, Hector Diaz faces his situation with a mixture of black humor, despair and philosophical detachment. Although gay, Hector seeks interpersonal involvement by plunging into the ``heterosexual theater'' of his best friend Susan Ded's crumbling marriage to the unfaithful Bill, who, in good yuppie fashion, attends a support group for philandering husbands. In this short, often harrowing tale, Obie-winning playwright and novelist ( The Whore of Tjampuan ) Kondoleon paints a wryly comic, if familiar, portrait of trendy Manhattan types, straight and gay, with their compulsive sex lives, therapists and self-important careerism. He follows his protagonist through a dinner party from hell to a Caribbean vacation with the Deds, an ordeal in a hospital emergency ward and a same-sex wedding. Hector takes on spiritual ballast in the form of works by medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart, who helps him to perceive ``the approach of angels . . . angels of every size and color, sympathetic, telepathic, exquisite.'' This is one of the glints of poetic fire that illuminate Hector's relentlessly ironic interior monologue. (Jan.)