BOOK REVIEW : ‘Rebel’ Without a Believable Voice

Rebel Without a Clue by Holly Uyemoto (Crown: $17.95; 192 pp.)

This is a novel about AIDS told through the voice of Christian Delon, an 18-year-old boy just graduated from high school and lazing through a landmark summer before college.

Christian is one of four best friends who have known each other from the beginning of (their) recorded time. These are Northern California boys who love sailing, surfing and the beach. But their lives, while affluent, are trouble-filled. Nicky is already dead by the time this story begins, a probable suicide--having sailed out past the Golden Gate and into oblivion. Adrian, still alive, is a drug-fried sociopath. But Christian’s best friend, Thomas Bainbridge, has left San Francisco two years earlier to strike out for a modeling career. Now, at 18, Thomas, America’s most famous male model, has just come down with AIDS.

The boys have done nothing, really, to deserve their respective fates, except to be born to their respective parents. Christian’s mother is a semi-invalid and a crazy person, but she got that way because Christian’s father has been in love with another man for years. And Thomas’ parents are a mixed bag: his mother is wonderful, stylish and forgiving, while his father is a gay-bashing drunk.

As for the sexual preferences of the two young men--Christian is carrying on a joyless affair with a girl who seems to be his mirror image in terms of name at least. She’s Christabel; she’s promiscuous, and this couple seem to stay together out of apathy more than anything else. Thomas states at one point in the narrative that he’s not gay. At another point, disdaining treatment for his disease, he speaks of “. . . endless counseling sessions where 10 (gays) get together and discuss the enumerable possibilities of dying as total social outcasts and give each other comforting hugs, ‘cause no one else will touch them.”

Thomas is bisexual and very casual about his own physical encounters; the novel is punctuated by two party scenes where Christian walks into deserted rooms to find Thomas having sex--once with a boy, which Christian deplores but tolerates, and once with a girl, for which Christian finally decides to end the friendship, and that effectively ends the novel.

There are several inconsistencies here, or places where the reader is left wondering. One is Thomas’ disease itself. He has lost 20 pounds but is still exquisitely beautiful. He has a lesion (“an angry circle of flesh wetness”) on his wrist and then on his back, but no one suspects that he’s ill, and he’s able to go on working on a major motion picture without getting tired or nauseous or dizzy or anything. No one suspects; there’s not a nasty rumor anywhere--despite his five-star fame.

Also strange is the language of Christian, the 18-year-old boy. He uses words like dulcet and gaggle, and constructs such sentences as, “After another full day of pastries and sitting around being completely worthless, I could barely keep my eyes from slamming and locking shut but the thought of Thomas getting out and having a good time with someone other than me was galvanizing with the lure of unburdened responsibility, if only for a night.”

A typographical error on page 42 suggests that this novel might once have been written in the third person. (A him turns up instead of what should have a me. ) And perhaps the author might have done better keeping some distance from her material.

Uyemoto has taken a determined, calculated risk in writing “Rebel Without a Clue.” She’s 19; she’s been working on this story for four years. Whether the result ranks with such youth-novels as “Devil in the Flesh” or “Bonjour Tristesse” or even “Less Than Zero” must finally be for the reader to judge. Picking on a 19-year-old girl who has just published her first novel is mean and low. You can go to hell that way. I’m not going to do it.