Night Letters.

It's no coincidence that the narrator of Robert Dessaix's new novel is a bookish Australian who rubs elbows with the literati and chooses to assess his life through its parallels with the art of Dante. Dessaix is Australia's foremost literary spokesperson, host of that country's nationally broadcast radio program Books and Writing. In that capacity he swaps ideas with pretty much every literary lion who shows up Down Under. Now, in his own first novel, Dessaix suavely sprinkles fun tidbits about real-life authors into an elegiac narrative patterned on Dante's The Divine Comedy. This unlikely combination makes for a sophisticated and profoundly moving literary debut.

Night Letters is a collection of 20 letters written in a hotel room in Venice by a man, identified only as R., who's been diagnosed with a terminal illness, probably AIDS. In what amounts to a farewell salute to the world, R. recounts conversations he's had with famous writers as well as with the blathering, sex-starved Professor Eschenbaum, who shows up in person to report his peccadilloes. Like the hero in Dante's Inferno, R. is in the middle of his life, not sure where he is headed or whether he wants to go anywhere at all. While he's deciding he wanders through Italy and explores European literature, reveling in the rich history of gay sex and physical mortality he finds in both places.

The book, which was an instant best-seller in Australia earlier this year, reads like autobiographical fiction. R. -- as in Robert? -- is every bit the catty critic. In one of many amusing cameos, he tells us the American mystery writer Patricia Highsmith drives like a lunatic and dresses shabbily. And he occasionally stops in the middle of a story to critique the writing of another author -- unfortunate device that is this book's single imperfection.

Although Night Letters celebrates an older literary tradition, Dessaix updates and reinvigorates it by using the contemporary subtext of AIDS and homosexuality to illustrate the pursuit of desire and its consequences. Like the traveler in The Divine Comedy, R. heads off for Paradise after discovering he's ill. His quest for happiness is neatly contrasted with stories from Eschenbaum, who pursues his bliss through sex and is made to pay for his romantic excesses.

R. attempts to flee his purgatory only to discover -- like many great fictional men -- that he carries his fate with him wherever he travels. In the end Dessaix cannot save his hero. But he offers as consolation a delicate, rewarding story that resounds with the masterful voices of other generations.