BUENAS NOCHES, BUENOS AIRES. By Gilbert Adair. 160pp. Faber. Paperback, Pounds

10. 99. - 0 571 20606 9

As they awoke to the life-altering implications of AIDS in the early 1980s, gay activists and artists came up with a range of defence strategies. While leaflets and lectures were committed to bare, brutal scientific fact, more searching explorations -from theatrical productions and films to gay pride parades and Queen concerts -often found refuge in the poetics of camp. No longer merely a way of seeing or being seen in queer circles, the masks of high drama and frivolity were now worn to undermine the tragedy of the new epidemic even as they thrust it into darkly comic relief.

Gilbert Adair's story of a young gay man's sexual education neatly brings together the component parts of a heightened camp aesthetic. The narrator Gideon is horny, hale, young and well read enough to seem worldly, but, for all that he has come out as gay, unpractised in the arts of seduction and sodomy.

Fleeing the dull routines of Oxford and London, he enters the milieu of an all-male, mainly gay common room in a Berlitz language school in Paris -the city less a physical place than a pungent, Gitanes-blurred metaphor for a life of cafe confessions and highly quotable literature.

The protagonist's initiation into the "'underbelly' of the Parisian gay scene" - the bar- hopping, bed-swapping and cottaging of the pre-AIDS days -looks set to be a natural extension of this louche, libertine world of excess-seeking expatriates.

Given to extravagant, scatalogical fantasizing, and bouts of searing self-analysis, the narrator remains largely an innocent abroad. His workmates casually recount sordid adventures worthy of Rimbaud and Verlaine every morning, while he is forced to lie outrageously just to keep up.

Neither Gideon's unrequited lust nor the lies he tells matter to us, such is the flighty nature of camp -the code of the common room inner circle -and its all-consuming irony. However, when it becomes clear that the new illness is not merely the stuff of tabloid sensation, but a genuine and fatal threat, Gideon is faced with a grave and galling choice: to catch up and risk getting AIDS, or opt for a new, controlled semi-celibacy. Perversely, his sex life, after so many wildly flung words, is just beginning to become flesh; he seems doomed to be kept outside the gay "family", now that membership is based not on having sex but on having AIDS.

Self-consciously stylish and at ease with every intertextual trick and tic to be found in the coolest manuals of modern prose -his 1992 essay collection, The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice, is one of them -Adair can push a pun too far at times. This has led some critics to view his virtuosity as mere verbal acrobatics and to challenge his want of substantial content (or perhaps something like tangible commitment). But in Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires it is the gay claim on a lifestyle which is promiscuous, libertine and luxurious and the camp narrative that is part of it that meet their nemesis in AIDS, and this is what Adair is exploring. Every linguistic turn here divulges a moral, and sexual, attitude. Even the choice of a novella is apt; the form gives poise to the subject matter (an out-of-control scourge) and keeps the tone taut and emotionally restrained, even as death destroys the AIDS-stricken gay community.

For those outside the gay writing scene Adair's book might seem less than timely, coming as it does almost twenty years after the Violet Quill gatherings in Manhattan and the publication of the first AIDS-inspired fictions. However, Edmund White, arguing "it's unconscionable to deal with anything (other than

AIDS)", has asserted the need for writers to be "AIDS bores". As far as boredom goes, he need not have been quite so pessimistic. The distance in time enables Gilbert Adair to wring a subtle discourse on form out of his story, but never at the cost of plot or pathos. The human drama he describes is fast paced, though nothing much happens, and the prose is as elegant in construction as it is eloquent about human relationships.

Almost lyrical in its symmetries, Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires is glancing and microscopic; the view is narrow, but minutely detailed, and never boring.