BORROWED LIGHT

Lugubrious first novel about the last days of a young architect who dies of AIDS.

It may well be true that when you are about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. When you die as slowly as David Baum, there is certainly enough time. A Washington, D.C., architect, David eventually dies of AIDS in 1992, but he contracted the disease in the late 1980s and seemed pretty resigned to his fate for the last few years. Born and raised in Dallas, David was an outsider from the start as a Jew in an overwhelmingly Christian community—but it was this early sense of seeing the world from the outside in that made it easier for him to recognize and live with his homosexuality. For some years, David was involved with Rich (an academic concentrating in agriculture and environmental issues), and the two of them bought and renovated a huge old 19th-century mansion on 16th Street, near Dupont Circle. David specialized in rehabilitating historic buildings, and the 16th Street house was a true labor of love. Unfortunately, his domestic life wasn’t as well organized, and David broke off with Rich a few years before he died. Told in flashback, David’s story is a chronicle rather than a lament in which he recalls his childhood, his early stirrings of ambition and lust, and his bittersweet recollections of life with his parents and sister before he went off to college in Virginia and began his career in Washington. Toward the end, David is comforted by visits from the estranged Rich and his distant father, both of whom try in their different ways to make sense of their conflicted feelings for the doomed young man.

Not quite Camille, but a real tearjerker nevertheless—one lacking the necessary depth to compensate for its overwhelming sentimentality.