BORROWED TIME An AIDS Memoir<i> by Paul Monette (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $18.95) </i>

This is a story of growing brotherhood: people accustomed to taking care of themselves being taught to care for their own. Of primal bonds severed when they’re needed most: young men dying, too afraid to seek out support from their parents. Of remaining limber and sensitive despite the paralyzing, numbing knowledge of one’s impending dissolution. Poet and novelist Paul Monette isn’t able to manage this feat at first; this eloquent and honest diary begins on a note of resignation, just after Monette has lost his lover, Roger Horwitz, to AIDS. “The very friends who tell me how vigorous I look, how well I seem, are the first to assure me of the imminent medical breakthrough. What they don’t seem to understand is, I used up all my optimism keeping my friend alive. Now that he’s gone, the cup of my own health is neither half-full nor half-empty. Just half.” And yet while Monette never recaptures any enthusiasm for sanguine symbolism--he’s too caught up in the day-to-day exigencies of survival--he’s anything but unfeeling. His stories of helping Roger and being helped by a close circle of friends are suffused with a warm sensitivity to the past and a never self-pitying, thoughtful analysis of the present.

The future, on the other hand, is not a player in these pages, for Monette, keenly aware that the AIDS virus is ticking inside of him, attempts none of the posturing about “looking death in the face” that usually comes from people who have yet to confront their own mortality. Denial dominates the first quarter of “Borrowed Time”: “What if we got it?” Monette asks Horwitz while lying on a beach near Big Sur. “Merely to pose the question was another shot at magic,” Monette writes. “Mention the unmentionable and it will go away, like shining a light around a child’s bedroom to shoo the monster.” Denial even when the evidence is mounting: “What are you coughing for?” Monette asks Horwitz. “Stop it.” And finally, an attempt to deny death through love: When Roger was told that he had an advanced case of AIDS, Monette clung to him tightly, “as if time had the decency to stop when we were entwined. . . . It begins in a country beyond tears. Once you have your arms around your friend with his terrible news, your eyes are too shut to cry.”