PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS.<i> By Allan Gurganus</i> .<i> Alfred A. Knopf: 336 pp., $25</i>

Nowhere have the depredations of AIDS been more visible than among our communities of actors, writers, dancers, artists and musicians. The arts, of course, are peculiarly fitted to make visible the vital preoccupations--in this case, the horror and anger--of those who exercise them. Many of them are gay, and it is one of the grievous ironies that the upsurge of gay themes in the 1980s, an artistic coming out of the closet, coincided with the start of a worse closeting. The news and the obituaries came almost at the same time.

Allan Gurganus, author of the highly praised “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” sets his new book in the New York arts world of the time. It was a decade, as he depicts it, that began with a near-bacchanalian sense of freedom for gay artists and ended with their decimation.

“Plays Well With Others” is an updating, in a sense, of Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year,” a novel in chronicle form about the great plague that devastated London in 1664. Gurganus laces Defoe quotes throughout his book, which, like its predecessor, is a weaving of fact and fiction.

It is the story of three young artists who arrive in New York around the beginning of the decade. One is Robert, a composer who achieves minor celebrity in trendy circles, as much for his beauty as for his music, and who bestows his much-sought-after favors on both sexes. The second is Hartley, an aspiring gay writer who is Robert’s bosom buddy in all but, to his desperate frustration, the literal sense. The third is Angie, a fiercely ambitious young painter, heterosexual, and eventually the only big success among the three. She too lusts after Robert: fruitlessly for the most part, though not entirely.

Love, in any case, binds the three of them closer than sex ever could. It is a characteristic of Gurganus’ three main characters and of the gay-centered world he depicts that sex and love not only have no obligatory relationship, they have an obligatory lack of relationship. This is estranging; it may fit the book’s chronicle aspect but seriously weakens it as a novel.

Robert, Angie and Hartley are mutual confidants, gossips, plotters and comrades in arms; they and two others--Gideon, a painter, and Marco, a free-form intellectual--are daily habitues at a table at Ossorio’s, a downtown hangout frequented by old Cuban domino players. There they exchange the daily war stories of struggle on New York’s cutting edge: sex (they are prodigiously promiscuous), careers and continual scrounging to make do until they make it.

By the end of the decade, four will be dead of AIDS, including Angie. Only Hartley remains, as burnt-out narrator. He has moved back to North Carolina, which, in his New York glory days, he had exulted in leaving; he alternates his account of those glory days with what followed them.

He has given up a literary career that had begun to flourish with a story or two in the New Yorker. His most important bit of writing, he tells us, is his address book. It is the ninth in a series recording the succession of phone numbers--from apartment to hospital to hospice to parents’ home to cemetery office--of the rest of the table at Ossorio’s, along with 16 other friends he nursed and buried.

Hartley’s voice converges and diverges with that of Gurganus, who is also gay and who frequented the New York scene, had a modestly successful career (unlike his narrator’s, it eventually took off), spent untold hours caring for dying friends and has moved back to North Carolina. Chronicle and novel coexist but not successfully.

Gurganus does some things splendidly. Hartley’s voice as he tells of sickbed vigils is witty and piercing. There are sentences that glisten like black opals. Here at the start is Robert, the former Adonis, in a half-coma and thin as “a hatrack.” His friends vainly play his favorite music, show him paintings he loved, perform skits: “Robert had lain silent for three weeks. This boy, so gently forward in life, now hid far back in a cave he must have told himself he was beginning to like. . . . He lived beneath the manhole of a mask he left us on his pillow.”

Hartley has rules for clearing out a dead friend’s apartment. Bring garbage bags: four gross more than you think you’ll need. Sort and discard fast. Learn where wills and address books are kept (the latter for the funeral invitations).

Gurganus’ accounts of living poor in New York, of building a network of fellow strugglers, of swapping word of parties, free tickets, apartments and leads is masterly. So is his agonizingly knowledgeable portrait of a painter trying to break into the gallery world.

Angie, his painter, changes her name to Alabama--having in mind Thomas Lanier Williams, a far-removed cousin who went far after he called himself Tennessee. She is fierce, resourceful and generous, and ruthless at taking all possible ways up. She gets a bank loan to go to the same health spa as the wife of a big gallery owner, makes friends with her and gets a show, rave reviews and a start on celebrity. There is parody here, of course, but it parodies reality. In any case, Angie is the book’s most vivid and memorable character.

There are not many others, unfortunately. “Plays Well With Others,” good as it is in depicting its milieu and the painful care of the AIDS-stricken, fails as a novel. Gurganus and his Hartley attempt to make their story big enough to bear the weight of their message: AIDS’ massacre of talent and lives in the gay art world and a proclamation of the beauty and bravery of that world.

Trying to do too much, perhaps, he falls into a sentimentality which frequently approaches soap opera, despite the wit of the writing. Robert, his golden lad, tomb of destroyed grace and talent, is an empty symbol. At no point do we see the allure that brings Hartley and Angie under his spell.

The account of Robert’s one and only breakthrough--Aaron Copland conducts an impromptu rehearsal of his uncompleted symphony--is ludicrous. It is hard to evoke, fictionally, a work of genius; Gurganus gives us program music. The musicians, instead of sipping coffee during breaks in their parts, listen transfixed. The ushers, distributing programs, pause to do likewise.

Gurganus portrays his AIDS deaths as tragedy. In tragedy, death serves to give a dimension of grandeur to life: to validate and ennoble it. Gurganus uses AIDS to validate and ennoble the gay life. But AIDS is something other than tragedy, and to write of it that way is to write failed tragedy, which is kitsch. If anything, it is closer to a holocaust, the obliteration of scorned innocents, though it lacks the monstrous human obliterator.

The German writer Theodor Adorno made the lapidary assertion that after the Holocaust, no art is possible, though he was only half right. After the Holocaust, only great art--think of Primo Levi, Paul Celan--is possible. Gurganus is a talented writer, but it isn’t enough.