BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Lessons in Fading Life and the Art of Detachment : DIARY OF A LOST BOY, <i> by Harry Kondoleon</i> , Alfred A. Knopf $20, 183 pages

The issue of “detachment’ arises frequently in playwright-poet Harry Kondoleon’s alternately hilarious and disturbing second novel.

Hector, its narrator, is a man in his 30s with full-blown AIDS who turns a trenchant and unforgiving eye on the people around him. Most especially, he devotes his attention to the failing, flailing marriage of Susan, his best friend since college, and Bill Ded, her amiable but faithless husband, a man with a charter membership in a Philandering Husbands Support Group.

“Was it a group to help curtain sexually compulsive behavior,” Hector wonders to himself, “or was it more of what it said it was, a club for husbands who wanted to be supported in their philandering?”

“It was a not particularly attractive group of men,” he archly continues. “But I have to admit the majority of their stories about sneaking around for sex were very sexy. I couldn’t help admiring the ingenuity and the downright Jacobean backdrop of guilt and self-loathing.”

Hector is able to study with hilarious effect many of his heterosexual acquaintances with a similar air of clinical equanimity.

“I was an Other,” he confides, “and they would tolerate, even welcome, a visitor from a foreign planet, provided I did not squirt alien fluid in their direction.”

Oddly, however, he seems even more removed from direct involvement in his own crises. With his once attractive body wasted away and his active libido all but a memory, he often seems more a neutral camera than a player.

It’s this inherent distance that gives Hector’s voice its quirky, irresistible flatness--a quality that brings to mind Rachel Ingalls’ strange and haunting novel, “Mrs. Caliban.” In fact, Hector is so perplexed at his own detachment that he constantly seeks the opinions of others, both historical and contemporary, on the subject. At one point, in a small elevator, he queries Susan’s mother:

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the principle of detachment. Do you know? Have you any position in particular you hold on detachment?”

To his surprise, she takes the question seriously. “It’s something that comes whether you like it or not,” she replies. “One learns to pretend. After a series of sharp disappointments we can’t help but retreat. You make little settlements with yourself. You attach yourself to less and less. There’s no judgment in it--fair play, actually, really, when you think about it. There are so many things I don’t give a goddamn about anymore, it would take a week to list them.”

Yet Hector, in spite of himself, periodically gets pulled back to life, such as the time Bill and Susan try to fix him up with a blind date at a dinner party.

“Here’s where the comedy grows as rich as French pastry,” he tells us, “as deep as the aroma from a pot-au-feu--anyway, anything French and superior.

“The pot-au-feu enters, whom we will call Max Drake, because that in fact is his real name. It would be too sticky to sit here and describe Drake’s beauty: It is complete in every visible detail. He even speaks eloquently, yet with no pretensions. He’s refined, well-mannered, a full, rich laugh informed by intelligence and human kindness. Just the kind of person I ordinarily would like to set fire to.”

But ultimately the promising Max, like so many of Hector’s friends, dies, leaving him alone and unconnected. “Old people do understand,” he decides. “The fatigue, the aching, the thinning away, and the nearly visible retreating of existence. A scarecrow in the waiting room said to me, ‘It’s pretty awful when you remember you were awfully pretty.’ ”

Only at the end, at the finish of his tale, does Hector let down his guard when addressing hypothetical readers, forgotten friends.

“I didn’t mention you, did I? I’m sorry. I meant to, in a way. You helped me, but I hated needing help. And then I got very involved thinking about S. and B.’s marriage.

“Who should I have loved? You? Or you? I would have had to let you look at me. Like this. You don’t know what I look like now. A branch from a burnt tree.

“What did you expect of me? What?--gratitude? I just wanted to forget . . . like everyone else. Forget for a little while and have a laugh! Then, as you know, it became impossible. It all wasn’t much fun then. Not for me and not for you.

“You. You. You. You’re all mad at me know. I didn’t describe the day I craved black cherries and you got them. And massaged my feet.”

Irony, that staple of survival humor, has long been Hector’s brave defense. Like plexiglass, it’s strong, but it’s also ultimately transparent. As we read “Diary of a Lost Boy,” we see straight through it, we see Hector, and we don’t feel a bit detached from him. Not for a minute.