Immune

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)