Heart specialist.

Allan Gurganus mixes compassion with a touch of kinkiness

Novelist Allan Gurganus is just getting warmed up. "My ambition as a writer is not only to take the characters through a series of events in their lives but to pull readers more deeply into the center of their own lives," he's saying on the phone from his home in North Carolina. His words ring out; his rising cadence sweeps the listener along. "This, for me, means taking people into their own courage, a word that comes from heart. I want to show people difficulties that are somehow encouraging and put the heart back into the reader. It sounds like cardiac surgery as I describe it, but it should be joyful. It should be extremely musical."

In his new book, The Practical Heart, Gurganus makes that joyful music. Wise to the undertow of our lives, he has both the emotional courage and the writer's chops to spelunk down deep into our hearts. His range as a writer can balance the crafted, psychological nuance of a Henry James with the bawdy high jinks of an Auntie Mame. This is no small feat and makes Gurganus's novels consistently revelatory as well as a hoot to read.

Born and raised in North Carolina, Gurganus saw his first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, receive tremendous commercial and critical success in 1989. The Practical Heart offers four novellas that reach across risky barriers of race, sexuality, and class. "I think there's more at stake in each of these novellas than I've ever been able to do before," he says. "I feel like I'm really just coming of age as an artist."

In the title tale a boy concocts a more agreeable, fantasy life for a great aunt, in which she was painted by the great John Singer Sargent. "Preservation News" has a wealthy matron offer us tribute to the gay man who changed her life. In "He's One, Too," the sexual secrets of a pillar of the community land him in scandal but offer mysterious agency to a 9-year-old boy who is clearly different. And finally, in the longest novella, "Saint Monster," a father and son confront long-hidden family mysteries as a car spins out of control on a North Carolina highway.

The depth of Gurganus's simultaneous empathy and queerness makes each page vibrate with an almost Whitmanic love for troubled humanity. "I think in this culture genuine tenderness is always somehow fugitive," he says. "It's always slightly secretive and slightly unexpected. I am always most aware of living as an outlaw. I am always deeply interested and drawn to characters who are outlaws."

This empathic quality is matched by Gurganus's raucous sexiness. When Tad, the gay home restorer in "Preservation News," finds himself alone in a room with Thomas Jefferson's nightshirt at Monticello, he does what any gay man faced with that opportunity would do--sucks the armpit to see what Jefferson's sweat was like. "I do seem to have a real sense for the animate implications of inanimate objects," says Gurganus when confronted with this kinky moment. "I never had a crack at Jefferson's undershirt, but when I was in the Navy dining Vietnam I found the underwear of a sailor I was in love with on the ship, and I can't tell you the uses I put that to!"

THE PRACTICAL HEART

* Allan Gurganus * Knopf * 352 pages * $25

Miller is executive director of Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, Calif.