Love Enter CL

Delineating a love quadrangle, Kafka ( Home Again ) dazzlingly evokes young passion, with all its attendant histrionics and extravagant proclamations. Intern Dan Schoenfeld, on the obstetrics rotation in a Louisiana hospital, seizes the moments between deliveries to use a hospital computer (password: LOVE) to compose ardent missives to each of three once-close friends. He reminisces on events five years past, when he was a 22-year-old dancer in Paris and shared an apartment with Beck, a Yale med student. Beck had introduced Dan to two more Americans--bisexual Bou and her lover, Margot--whom Dan fell for as a single entity. Dan's first letter, to Bou, confesses his continued desire for her; his next, to Beck, attempts to show that an impetuous affair with Bou was destiny, not selfishness; his third, to Margot, details the clique's deterioration and implicates Beck, until then a voice of reason. Through luxuriant language and an aphrodisiacal Parisian backdrop, Kafka keenly conveys Dan's nostalgia, offsetting his feverish memories of the past with the everyday miracles and tragedies surrounding him on the maternity ward. Author tour. (Apr.)