"Borrowed Time" is maybe Monette's greatest work, and "Becoming a Man" his most honored--but this novel is my favorite. A fairly simple story about a young performance artist, sick with AIDS, finding bits of life and making peace with his past at a vacation house on the ocean, it devolves into melodrama at the end, but that's hardly the point. The point is the writing, which gets inside the head of a somewhat confused and undirected person and finds gems there, some of which, I guarantee, are in your head too, except you won't realize it until you read them here. This is real fiction.

"Some mornings you wake up whole. You open your eyes, and the ceiling is swirling with light reflected off the ocean. The bright air pours through the balcony doors like tonic. It's not that you forget even for a moment that you're sick. But if you're not in pain, the sheet ballast of being alive simply astonishes. I fling off the comforter, filling the air with feathers like confetti. I rise and caper across the threadbare carpet in my Jockey shorts. I slip through the french doors, the first sight of the limitless blue never failing to catch my heart. I straddle the stucco balustrade like a pony and drink it all in. The smell of sea pine and eucalyptus wafts around me. I don't want anything else but this."