Someone Waits for Me. (Books).

Stone, Martha E.

Where the Boys Are

by William J. Mann

Kensington Books. 432 pages, $24.

IT's millennium eve in New York City, and ex-boyfriends Jeff and Lloyd are celebrating at a raucous gay club. In the course of the evening Jeff falls for a young man named Anthony who, within the space of a few hours, he invites to move in with him in Boston's South End. Anthony, it turns out, has a secret life, one that Jeff, a journalist, manages to unravel by the end of the novel in what makes for a surprisingly moving subplot. Various friends, lovers, and hangers-on wend their way through Where the Boys Are, and the boys mostly seem to be dancing and doing Ecstasy at circuit parties, dropping everything at a moment's notice to travel from Montreal to Miami, Hotlanta to New Orleans, and descending into K-holes from which (for at least one character) there is no escape.

Jeff and Lloyd are figures that we originally encountered in William 3. Mann's earlier novel, 1997's The Men from the Boys, set in Provincetown and Boston. Their on-again-off-again relationship continues in Where the Boys Are, where we meet a new major character, Henry, who harbors a secret crush on Jeff and, inevitably enough, feelings of jealousy over Jeff's relationship with the insufferable Lloyd (who always describes himself as a "trained psychologist"). The three major characters tell the story in their own voices and address the reader directly as "you," producing a somewhat folksy and overly earnest effect. Alas, Lloyd's voice is a tiresome and holier-than-thou one, causing the reader to hasten past his words to find out what circuit party Jeff will be running off to next.

Lloyd has met a harridan named Eva, who's into past-life regression, at a seminar on psychic healing. Without doing any research on the subject, Lloyd and Eva decide to buy a B&B in Provincetown. Only Jeff is able to see the evil in Eva and does his best to avoid her. A middle-aged widow--she was once married to a gay man--Eva is adept at luring men into her web. She showers them with unwanted attention and expensive gifts, and occasionally even seduces one of them, even though all her victims are gay. If they dare to spurn her pursuit, she retaliates in ways that call, at the very least, for a long-term restraining order.

Several years have passed since the story of The Men from the Boys came to a close. Javitz, Jeff and Lloyd's saintly mentor, had died in the earlier work, but his character permeates the pages of the sequel. His becomes a Christ-like figure for Jeff and Lloyd, who are constantly invoking his name as a touchstone. "What would Javitz do? How would he advise us?" One wonders if they'll ever learn to think for themselves. Perhaps eventually they'll have to, after the considerable sum that Javitz left them in his will runs out. It's disappointing to watch them fritter it away, page after page, on their airline tickets and expensive knickknacks for the B&B. The most entertaining character in Where the Boys Are is Henry, an AOL chat-room addict who decides to become an escort by night while working in the insurance industry by day. The pleasure of his nighttime clients comes first and he always wants to make sure they get their money's worth, which leads to some of this novel's more entertaining chapters.

It's no surprise that Eva and Lloyd's B&B, named Nirvana, doesn't survive for even a year. What is surprising is that Eva finally decides to see a therapist and discovers her inner lesbian--with the help of a Provincetown drag king. There's no denying that this is an entertaining, if overwritten and overwrought, novel. Mann is at his best when considering the ways in which the gay community constructs, deconstructs, and rebuilds its complex system of families and friendships.