Walking on Air

Walking on Air, a rather oxymoronic title chosen by author R.S. Jones, is a relentlessly grim tale of a man being ravaged by AIDS. In a very effective opening, William, a dying man, remembers his childhood on a Western farm and how his father would mark a pig for slaughter by painting its snout with a fluorescent green triangle. The green mark is a metaphorical link to the pink triangle that will come to symbolize the ''Silence equals death'' devastation of the AIDS epidemic. William breaks with his family, goes to New York, and makes it as an investor, only to fall ill. Jones carefully examines all the psychological nuances of the dying and their caretakers: the isolation, the loneliness, the feeling of being treated like a leper. One reads Walking on Air compulsively, hoping for comic relief, but Jones has no intention of letting us up even for a single breath. B+