72 Churches -- And Also AIDS

By Pico Iyer

When a 32-year-old man suddenly died in Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1985, the local medics assumed the cause to be pneumonia. After they found out it was AIDS, some of them made tasteless jokes about the man's sexuality and others suggested they bury his respirator. It was not that they were ill-intentioned, as Abraham Verghese points out in My Own Country (Simon & Schuster; 347 pages; $23); it was simply that AIDS, to say nothing of homosexuality, was something that happened somewhere else. For a quiet Bible Belt town of dance halls and churches (72 of them), the disease was an unwanted foreigner.

Verghese arrived in small-town Appalachia two months later as an infectious- disease specialist, and soon found himself the de facto expert on the new plague. His main enemies were ignorance and prejudice, his own and other people's: he met transcriptionists who would run away so as not to have to type up his examinations of gay patients, and dentists who would refuse to see unmarried men. In the tradition of the best doctor-writers, from Somerset Maugham to Ethan Canin, Verghese took it all down with a fine mix of compassion and precision, understanding not only why men suffer but how they feel.

What gives his first book an added dimension, though, is that Verghese is an Indian Christian, born and raised in Ethiopia, and arrived in the U.S. at almost exactly the same time as the foreign disease. He brings to his new home all the attentive relish of an affectionate visitor, savoring the local talk of "horny pills" and "smiling mighty Jesus" and rolling on his tongue the names of the towns where he works: "Mountain City, Tazewell, Grundy, Norton, Pound "

The book represents a diagnostician's exhaustive checkup of his new community, in which he finds as many hidden fears and lesions as in any of his patients. He meets a preacher who has "penile, rectal and pharyngeal gonorrhea." He hears of macho truck drivers who have quick liaisons with men because they don't charge, and he learns of married men in church making dates with the gay men they know. Most of all he listens with sympathy to the woman who begs him to keep her son's disease a secret so she won't have to endure "faggot" put-downs, and to the dying man who says calmly, "I'm not saying that I necessarily deserved this, but I am saying that I have no one to blame but myself."

Verghese makes indelible narratives of his cases, and they read like wrenching short stories told in Bobbie Ann Mason plainsong. Take Will Johnson, say, the dignified pillar of his church and his community, who contracts AIDS through a blood transfusion and then passes it on to his devoted wife, the two of them ending up frightened and alone in a huge medical center, reading The Magic Mountain to each other. Or Vickie, the chattery, brawling woman from the trailer park who gets infected by her husband and comes at last to feel that AIDS has given her a purpose in her life, as she signs up to be a nurse.

Every now and then, Verghese's asides about the air conditioning in his Datsun 280Z read a little like undigested diary entries, and there are a few writers'-program tics in evidence here (in fact, no car appears without being | named by brand). Yet the strength of his book lies in its agonized humanity. It is odd and touching that the lifelong wanderer comes to know the foreign worlds of AIDS and America, death and human warmth, simultaneously. And in the end, passing on his tolerance like a benign contagion, Verghese comes to make the first-person singular of his title plural.