Walking on Air: A Novel

In his new novel, Walking on Air, R. S. Jones has produced a gripping meditation on the bonds of love and trust in the face of shattering crisis. William Addams is dying. Controlling, mercurial, estranged from his family, he is consumed by the fear that he'll be abandoned as his disease careens out of his control. To avoid this, he focuses his considerable attention on Henry and Susan, his closest friends, the only people to whom his care can fall.
It has always been William's desperate hope that the bonds of friendship will prove to be as durable as any family ties, yet he cannot rid himself of the dread that Susan and Henry will leave him. What he wants is for their faithfulness to last until they take him home to his beloved house to die. But as William's condition worsens, it becomes apparent that his expectations of devotion and loyalty involve not simply a loving commitment but the virtual handing over of his friends' vitality and independence; indeed, William covets their very lives.

Jones, a publishing insider (he's a HarperCollins editor) got some excellent reviews for his first novel, Force of Gravity, four years ago, and his second shows the same ability to create an odd, obsessive world. William Addams (he insists on the second 'd' to emphasize his estrangement from his California family) is dying of AIDS in New York?and it is one of the book's oddities that his disease is never specified, although it could hardly be anything else. Terrified of perishing alone, yet severe, prickly and fiercely independent, William relies entirely on two friends who subsume their own lives and interests in an effort to help him: Henry, a rather vague, ineffectual teacher who was briefly William's lover, and Susan, a successful real estate saleswoman who is declining into lonely spinsterhood and largely sublimates her thwarted sexual energies in caring for William. William's terror at the hideous encroachments of his disease is the source of the book's greatest power; the sheer physical horror of human disintegration is graphically depicted in rare and unsparing detail. The little tugs-of-war among the three protagonists as William alternately asserts his independence and his needs, the flickering levels of caring and resentment in Henry and Susan, are skillfully evoked but are, alas, more familiar from other AIDS chronicles. The relationships seem oddly airless, and the apocalyptic climax is jarring. Jones's writing, however, is always vital and precise, and he achieves many memorable moments of horror and compassion. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In his second novel (following Force of Gravity, Viking, 1991), Jones presents an unflinching portrait of a man dying of an incurable disease who explores the nature of friendship, love, and trust as his friends grapple with their conflicting emotions. William had severed all ties with his family and their farm long ago and created an agreeable life in the city: a wonderful apartment, a circle of friends, a neighborhood gay bar hangout, and a weekend beach house. He always said his friends were now his family, but he keeps secrets from even his two closest friends, Henry and Susan. Once William knows he is dying, he becomes increasingly unpleasant, demanding, and manipulative, playing on Henry's and Susan's guilt feelings to make sure they won't desert him. The author fills so much of this novel with graphic details of William's horrible decline that the heart of the book-Henry's and Susan's very human doubts about their feelings for William-is never at the forefront. This leaves the reader unprepared for the ending, where the focus shifts from William's disease to a defiant and morally questionable act by Henry. Recommended for larger collections only.
Patricia Ross, Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.