Immune
Sharon Mayes. New Rivers Press, $16.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-89823-096-3
This disappointing novel starts with the disappearance of its heroine off the coast of California. An apt beginning, for the character of Suzanne Keller, a doctor doing research on AIDS in San Francisco in the early 1980s, is never fully realized. Brilliant as well as beautiful, Suzanne has been less successful in a dizzying multitude of personal relationships with other bright young professionals who, like her, take drugs to mute the strain of everyday lives. For a week after her disappearance, Suzanne's latest lover, also an AIDS doctor, keeps vigil in a cave on Point Reyes, reading her journal and trying to determine whether she killed herself. Before dating him, Szuanne had been married several times, lived with a literature professor and, most recently, had affairs with a young psychiatrist, a drug-dealing stockbroker and her sadistic psychotherapist, along with his bisexual lover, all of which is revealed in her journal. Unquestionably current and topical, this novel is a pharmaceutical lexicon and, possibly, an accurate chronicle of early AIDS research. It is also, however, overwritten, confusing and of questionable taste. Suzanne's end comes as no surprise. (October 30)
Details
Reviewed on: 09/30/1987
Genre: Fiction