Touch

Sherman's second novel (after One Dark Body) does not entirely circumvent the pitfalls of didacticism as it tells the story of an African American woman who finds out that she's HIV-positive. At 35, Rayna Sargent of Seattle, Wash., works as a crisis counselor at a mental-health facility. But she's adamant that it's only a day job, a way to support her true calling as an artist. The first part of the book is filled with events that conspire to increase Rayna's awareness of AIDS: she and a friend display their collaborative ceramic tile collage at an exhibition for an AIDS hospice; an old friend suffers from the disease; and an HIV-positive client at the mental-health center accuses a doctor of malpractice. Sherman uses these situations to put into the mouths of her characters sentiments, and sentences, aimed more at raising her readers' consciousnesses than at telling a story or deepening character. Still, if the novel is preachy and often repeats some of the most commonly employed phrases of various activists (whether feminist, gay, black, concerned about AIDS, or any combination thereof), Sherman manages to make her tale moving. The heart of the story is how Rayna copes with the brutal, personal reality of an illness that had, until then, been just another ``issue'' to her. Keeping a journal helps Rayna cope, but she learns that neither her writing nor her drawing is sufficient balm. What she requires is the healing capacity of human touch; in rendering how she gets it, how a woman with a terminal illness is still a whole erotic and spiritual being, Sherman does her best writing. (Sept.)