BOOK REVIEW : A Search for Self Wrapped in Moving Words and Suffering : A KEEPER OF SHEEP <i> By William Carpenter</i> , Milkweed Editions, $21.95, 327 pages

“Overhead there were stars, and I thought of each one of them as a cocktail party sending its fragile verbal energy into the chill of space,” says Penelope (Penguin) Solstice, the narrator of William Carpenter’s first novel. She is at an earthly cocktail party, in Squid Harbor, on Cape Cod, recently expelled from Dartmouth for torching a fraternity house where a gang rape occurred.

Her father, Richard, a metal sculptor, arrived earlier with his new wife and former student, Dorothy Dvorjak. Penguin has already discovered one of Dorothy’s sculptures, a web of wire that “looked alive, and although it was small . . . it seemed to threaten every sculpture in the room, every piece of furniture and even the house itself. It was the only non-living thing I had ever seen that looked like it was about to grow.”

Dorothy’s art is portentous. It symbolizes the novel’s larger threat--the AIDS virus, brought to Squid Harbor by Arnold Fratorelli, a composer and lover of Joshua Brand, the Solstices’ longtime friend and next-door neighbor.

Arnold is trying to finish his last composition, an arrangement of the poems of Fernando Pessoa, to be called “The Keeper of Sheep.” Because she is close by, energetic and idle, Penguin agrees to become a keeper of Arnold, taking care of him while Joshua is away.

And she becomes Arnold’s champion, defending his right to live and die in Squid Harbor against the ignorance and mounting hysteria of other residents, who fear infection, perhaps through mosquito bites. In the course of the novel, Penguin works to understand her relationships with family and friends and learns to feel--not just think--her way through life.

Penguin says of herself and her contemporaries, “We are so . . . privileged that we don’t even exist,” and sadly, it’s true. It’s hard to believe or care for the world of “perfectly transparent” martinis, repartee, and literary allusion in which much of this novel moves. Penguin’s search for self takes place behind a lot of clever talk, and it’s tiring to listen to. And in the end, her transformation from self-absorption to compassion gets drowned out by talk.

At times, AIDS seems like just another topic of conversation, rather than a real issue. One wishes the writer himself recalled an early passage, in which Squid Harbor residents have been discussing the spread of the AIDS virus, and then Penguin imagines, “the words dissolved into the night air and became as invisible as the microbes they supposedly described. There were places words couldn’t reach though, like the actual sickness of a real person.”

Yet the novel’s real strength is language. William Carpenter is also a poet, and that sensibility is alive everywhere. The characters are linked by Penguin’s dreams in which the writing is simple, stark, the images concrete and powerful: ruined houses, wounded animals, burned bodies. Some of these images grow with the novel.

Not surprisingly, the chapters in which Penguin and Arnold are alone together are the most memorable, the writing clean and moving: Arnold’s “face was white and narrow and the veins were so close to the surface that it seemed like the top layer of skin had come off. His lips were crazed with the same white lines only more pronounced than ever. He was freshly shaved too. In places. It looked like somebody had hacked off his beard with a flint knife. He held on with both hands to the satin edge of the white cotton blanket as if his bed were in fearful and violent motion, like a man holding a crossbar of a roller coaster.”

Penguin has an uncanny ability to say exactly the right thing to him, whether it be consolation or gentle reprimand. She learns patiently and stoically to feed Arnold, move him, clean him, administer injections and oxygen. In these scenes, she’s finally quiet, and the prose is tender, compelling. “I was still holding Arnold’s book of poems. On its slick dust jacket was a single red drop the color of the world at sunset that was darkening and congealing on the glossy surface. It looked and acted like typical human blood. It hardened into itself as if to shield a tiny wound on the surface of the book. Within that drop, the red and white cells swam in a clear medium that would taste like a memory of the sea . . . I touched the end of one finger to the half-coagulated blood, then brushed my forehead with it at a place above and between the eyes.” This act of marking is more resonant than any of Penguin’s talk.

Of course words and talk are all any novelist has to tell a story. A novel lives in the space between invented talk and the thing or things that happened, between, as Penguin says, “how we want things to be and how they are exactly.” So, “A Keeper of Sheep” is at its best when Penguin’s talk meets the very real force of Arnold’s suffering. These moments do send “fragile verbal energy into the chill of space,” and they are full of risky, original power.