The God in Flight

In The God in Flight Laura Argiri tries to write a Victorian novel about a virtually unspeakable subject in Victorian times: gay love and sex. The result is a romantic melodrama, set at Yale in the 1880s. Call it campus camp. Its characters ride in horse-drawn buggies, fight migraine headaches with laudanum, and long quaintly for ''carnal gratification.'' Art professor Doriskos Klionarios looks and sculpts like a Greek god. His teenage student, Simion Satterwhite, has a faunlike beauty and a genius for math. Their true love triumphs over child abuse, anorexia, homophobia, censorship, and the violence of bigots. In fact, Argiri's 1880s sound more hopeful than our 1990s — an irony that gives this lush, effusive work some satiric bite. B