by Andrew Holleran

(Hyperion) $23.95

Andrew Holleran's 1984 novel, Dancer from the Dance, depicted a place and time (1970s gay New York) so vividly that it became a touchstone for contemporary gay fiction. Whether this is good or bad is open to debate. Lots of people have taken Dancer to task over its narrowly defined depiction of gay life--David Leavitt (himself a touchstone for over-indulged youngish gay writers) has said that it's one of the most damaging books a young gay man can read in his coming out years. Well, Davey, that may be true. But Dancer still tells some ugly truths about being a gay man--and sets them in a glittering meringue of prose.

Holleran's depiction of gay subculture lives on in his new collection of short fiction, In September the Light Changes. The characters are 25 years older and most of them have moved out of New York, but they are unmistakable reinventions. Dancer's over-the-top drag queen Sutherland has been transformed into the Bumblebee Boy. The beautiful Malone haunts every page. And guess what? They're still lovesick and lust-driven.

There are books in this new gilded age of queer fiction that write above the pathos of being gay--intersecting sexual identity with a whole range of other human experiences (Michael Cunningham's The Hours comes to mind, as does Ben Niehart's Hey, Joe). This book is not one of them. Holleran's characters are saturated in gay consciousness. Reading these stories is like entering an odd wonderland inhabited by men who define their days by Maria Callas recordings and great bicep development. There are moments when you feel like you're eavesdropping on really good cocktail-party chatter. It's fun (if a little creepy) until you get to the other part: the sorrow, the intense longing, the fear. Reading Dancer today is almost unbearably sad, as the reader knows that AIDS is right around the corner. But it was sad enough in the era and context in which it was originally written, in the same way these new stories are sad now. Bittersweet has always been what Andrew Holleran does best, and he does it very well here. MICHAEL WELLS

WHO'S IRISH?

by Gish Jen

(Random House) $22

Not to stereotype (gasp!) Asian American authors, but these days, they like to write about identity crises. Who am I? Where do I belong? Should I marry the honky I love, or the abusive Asian the folks have arranged for me? It is, therefore, quite refreshing to sidestep all these wimpy themes in Who's Irish?, Gish Jen's collection of eight liberating short stories, all with Chinese and/or Chinese American characters, in which the question posed is "I know exactly who I am, but who are you?"

The first (and title) story is told by a Chinese grandmother who is put in charge of her daughter's rugrat, an uninhibited half-breed whose rambunctious temperament is unacceptable by Chinese standards. When the grandmother attempts to solve this dilemma on her own terms, i.e., physical punishment, her daughter and Irish son-in-law balk at the old woman's apparent cruelty. As told from the grandmother's point of view, the story raises the question of whether or not her treatment of the child is cruel if it is part of one's culture. This first story sets up a theme of violence, related to one's ethnic heritage, that runs through the short stories at a macabre but well-balanced pace. In "Chin," a white kid in Yonkers witnesses his Chinese neighbor get beaten to a messy pulp by his father, "so he'll grow up to be a doctor who can practice in America." And in "The Water Faucet Vision," a pubescent narrator blandly describes the outbreaks of domestic turbulence between her parents like a trip to the dentist, until one night when her mother mysteriously goes flying out the upstairs window.

The stories can't help but deal with issues of identity, but what differentiates this collection from its namby-pamby peers is that Jen's characters know exactly who and what they are. It is because of this solid sense of self that interesting stories form, as egos brush up against one another, sometimes like kittens, other times like plate tectonics. JILL WASBERG

MIDNIGHT CHAMPAGNE

by A. Manette Ansay

(Morrow) $24

Move over, Richard Ford: A. Manette Ansay's got love and human life cross-haired on her pages. Ansay's new novel, Midnight Champagne, sets a day's action at a wedding in a winter storm, floating from character to character as harmoniously as the polka that ends the novel. But the relationships of these characters are far from harmonious: bitter, close-quartered, passionate, even murderous, they fill the page with the murmur of real life.

In portraying these characters Ansay assays some beautiful prose, excelling in deft images and quick forks of wisdom. "His head was like the dome of a peeled boiled egg, peppered with moles, salted with tiny albino freckles. A single, vigorous tuft of hair remained above his forehead, but he'd cropped it close, as if to quell its enthusiasm." You know these people and their diatribes: "'What does that word mean? Love.' She said it the way someone else might have said sin. 'I'll tell you what--anything sticks to you long enough, you'll wind up calling it love.'"

Hilda Liesgang, matriarch, flickers through the storyline worrying. Every day for the past 19 years she has found a penny--except certain fateful days, when, without exception, someone near her has died. On this day, she has yet to find her penny.

April, the bride, cannot believe that her ex-boyfriend has showed up at the wedding. Her new husband, whom she has known for only three months, embodies everything opposite from her ex, Barney. This is why she is so in love. No one else seems to understand this.

Midnight Champagne has the artistic composition of a painting by Brueghel. In the end you escape exhaling the close breath of claustrophobia, extricating yourself slowly from the throes of a family that feels all too real. A. Manette Ansay reads Tues June 22 at Elliott Bay, 101 S Main St, 624-6600, 7:30 pm, free. TRACI VOGEL