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All six stories in Barnett's debut collection are awash in memories. You can hardly read more than a page without being thrown into the past. Not the historic past, but the protagonists', recalled with a pensiveness too deep for nostalgia, too bemused for regret. Of the stories' six protagonists, three are gay men with AIDS or the AIDS virus; a fourth is a lesbian with cancer. The other two, also gay, are a young man who has never met his father and a college freshman sifting through his sexual experiences. Barnett deftly limns all six, as well as those closest to them, presenting them as essentially searchers for security who, with the partial exception of the woman, have found it thus far only in sex, which is the content of their most ardent recollections, although not of their remaining hopes. --Ray Olson

Publishers Weekly
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Barnett's first book is a skillful, sad and sometimes stoic look at gay and lesbian love in six short stories. Haunted by AIDS and by the difficulty of connecting romantically even under the best of circumstances, his characters are perplexed realists doing battle with unreasonable fears and towering problems. Often isolated or adrift, they seek to understand the incomprehensible. A young man's fractured family and dim past in ``Snapshot'' lead him to yearn for love without fully grasping the extent of his need, so that ``to want and want and want, and not to know that you are wanting, means that you are never sure of anything.'' In ``The Body and Its Seasons,'' a disillusioned student searches for solace in sex, concluding, `` `This intimacy thing is highly overrated.' '' Barnett's willingness to venture into explosively emotional terrain with empathy, candor and balance is perhaps best revealed in his stunning ``The Times As It Knows Us,'' where men sharing a summerhouse appear to have created family within the gay community--yet even this proves illusory. Though occasionally overcrowded with allusions to art, architecture and culture, the book incisively reveals that in our hearts and souls, as well as our bodies, lie the real dangers. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A collection of six stories--mainly about the appalling human devastation in the AIDS-ravaged homosexual community--that is both epiphany and education: Barnett, while often realistic and clinically precise, is seldom merely a journalist--he'll avoid sentimentality or breast-beating in favor of cleareyed portraits that have psychological and emotional depth. ""Snapshot,"" a touching reminiscence, jumpcuts from a narrator's life with his mother and stepfather to scenes with a male lover, all the while focusing on the absent real father. Likewise, ""The Body and its Seasons"" juxtaposes bisexual Gordon's former life in a seminary with present-day sex (women are ""endlessly insatiable""). In ""Philostorgy, Now Obscure,"" Preston, diagnosed with AIDS, discusses with two women (former roommates, one knowledgeable about the disease, the other pregnant) how to tell his mother. The tone is nostalgic: ""There were times when things, like love or a pact with life, seemed possible only in the past."" ""The Times As It Knows Us"" moves into a communal dwelling where nearly everyone is either sick or HIV-positive. A kind of gallows humor prevails: everyone is mad at Perry, who advanced his career by being interviewed about the communal situation (""If it weren't for AIDS, you'd still be doing recreation therapy at Bellevue""). ""Succor"" is about a man with a ""Catholic-taught mind"" who brings dying people into his place (filled with medical apparatus) and wrestles with spiritual concerns. Last, the title story is from the point of view of a lesbian with a child, Rachel, whose surrogate father died of AIDS and who is rejecting the family dynamic in favor of heterosexuality. Most impressively, these stories create a dramatic world of the kind necessary to successful fiction without turning an all-too-literal disease into metaphor. A promising debut. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.