Dancing on the Moon: 2short Stories about AIDS

This collection's subtitle may strike readers as somewhat misleading: instead of dealing with the broad spectrum of people with AIDS, Currier focuses almost exclusively on the disease's impact on the gay community. The minutiae of one patient's decline are relentlessly though movingly chronicled in ``What They Carried''; a mother's histrionic hypochondria sadly separates two lovers in the plaintive ``Montebello View.'' Throughout, a miasma of grief generally weighs more heavily and more affectingly than dialogue or description, as keenly exemplified when two friends--one healthy, one sick--try on ``Winter Coats.'' A few of the 12 stories lack a distinctive voice, their intensity mounting instead into a kind of lament (effective, if perhaps not the most cogent use of the short-story genre). Most of Currier's writing is palpably poignant, although intermittently he succumbs to cliches of plot or characterization--e.g., ``I never thought I would reach a point in my life where I felt like I was drowning--floundering and fumbling without any sense of direction.'' And the emotions he depicts can be elusive, seemingly just out of our grasp or perception. Perhaps the most pervasive sentiment here is uttered by one of the southern teenagers in ``Civil Disobedience'': ``People are dyin' and nobody is doin' anythin'.'' (Mar.)