An Unmetaphoric Illness : SKINNED ALIVE, <i> By Edmund White (Alfred A. Knopf: $23; 254 pp.)</i>

AIDS, whether we like it or not, is the lens through which we now view contemporary gay male writing. This simple fact is as limiting as it is illuminating. In the case of “Skinned Alive,” Edmund White’s new collection of short fiction, it is inevitable. It is not simply that the stories have the feel of autobiography (whatever the overlap of fact and imagination, they are fiction) but also that five of the eight stories are directly concerned with AIDS. As White’s characters go through their daily lives, the consciousness of AIDS--if not the disease itself--moves with them, stalking them, greeting them in unexpected places and sometimes even offering them epiphanies, both welcomed and not.

White’s autobiographical novels--the 1982 “A Boy’s Own Story” and the 1988 “The Beautiful Room Is Empty,” with “The Farewell Sympathy” promised next year--are contemplative, ruminative looks at growing up gay and sexual in mid-century America. White’s queer Bildungsroman spans two traditions. His writing style is profoundly American, but influenced by a European romanticism and feeling for the inner life: Sherwood Anderson’s plain-spokenness crossed with Marcel Proust’s baroque complexities. In the title story, the narrator, an American writer living in Paris, is asked: “You are known as a homosexual, a writer and an American. When did you first realize you were an American?” “When I moved to France,” he replies. In many ways, White’s journey to, as Susan Sontag has phrased it, the country of the unwell, has made life clearer, more felt for his characters.

The stories in “Skinned Alive” are something between a coda to and a flash-forward from White’s novels. They present us with a series of (autobiographical?) narrators who project the protagonists of the novels into an uncertain future. The stories are meditations on desire and mortality, on how incipient illness and death encourage and modulate erotic passion. The forthright life celebrations and sexual concerns of White’s earlier writings are now mediated by loss and grief. It is as though the high spirits of Tom Sawyer have dovetailed with the profound melancholy of Young Werther.

The question of how we deal with AIDS, or of what AIDS means in our lives is not new. Writers from David Feinberg to Paul Monette to Sarah Schulman have explored this territory cogently. What Edmund White conjures here is a serious, sustained look at how AIDS measures and shapes the meaning of our existence. In “An Oracle” the surviving partner of a couple knows he has to “go on with his own life, but he scarcely knew how or why to pick up the threads. The threads were bare, worn thin, so that he could see right through what should have been the thick stuff of everyday comings and goings, could see pale blue vistas. ‘You must look out for yourself,’ George had always said. But what self?” Even the drive and power of sex are transfigured. In “Palace Days” the narrator discovers that the shape and form of his eroticism have changed: “Mark had never been faithful to anyone before. In fact, he preached against fidelity, which he considered as barbaric as female circumcision. Now, he liked it because it meant he was concentrating all his energy and desire to one person.” Another character realizes that “if and when the disease surfaced . . . he wouldn’t much mind. In a way dying would be easier than figuring out a new way of living.” This may be an echo of the echt -romanticism of Young Werther but is also the hard-bitten reality of life in the epidemic.

“Skinned Alive” is artful and perceptive. White’s language and insights are seamlessly joined together so that the form and function of grief and pain, terror and pity are one. There are no easy answers here--who could provide any answers in the midst of such physical and emotional confusion and dislocation?--but simply observations and quiet witness. “Skinned Alive” not only moves Edmund White’s fictionalized autobiographical work into the present but provides us, with grace and intelligence, new ways of seeing how we live now.