LAZARUS RISING

Two lovers face daunting challenges in 1992.

When Dempsey Coates offers Johnny Donegan a respite from his duties as a New York City firefighter in her Tribeca loft building, the encounter launches the mismatched pair into a complex relationship that’s shadowed by her diagnosis of AIDS, contracted while using intravenous drugs. Johnny, the son of a traditional Irish Catholic family on Staten Island, falls instantly in love with the beautiful, troubled artist, who’s at work on a series of paintings recounting the biblical story of Lazarus, even becoming her model. Their episodic affair becomes more complicated when he encounters the objections of his parish priest, who explains that the need for Johnny to practice safe sex prevents the church from giving its blessing should they wed, and Dempsey’s medical condition takes an unusual turn after Johnny, in a fit of desperation at his faith’s intransigence, allows himself to pray for a cure. Caldwell, a playwright and memoirist, impressively tackles consequential themes like the power of belief, miracles, and the oppressive weight of guilt, but he’s overly fond of descriptive prose that, for all its facility, too often serves to subordinate these themes and the plot itself to unnecessary digressions. In its concluding chapters, the novel becomes darker as Dempsey, a fierce atheist, and the almost saintlike Johnny, who is credited with rescuing two people from burning buildings, grapple with the unforeseen directions in which fate has guided their lives. When each, in a radically different way, chooses to respond to the lessons gleaned from their experience, their decisions seem jarring rather than earned, leaving behind an aftertaste of unfairness in place of the inevitability that’s the stuff of great tragic drama.

An enigmatic love story set at the height of the AIDS pandemic.