WITTY ULYSSES

By GINA BELLAFANTE

If lovers in fiction are to be divided into givers and takers, then Blue Monahan is one of its greatest philanthropists. In his 30s, he has arrived late to the world of relationships, but he has developed a heart the size of the Ford Foundation. He offers all--affection, unflinching honesty, gifts of fine silverware--to the men he falls for, but his charity is almost always misguided. Blue's lovers are a cold, selfish lot who rebuff his devotion with parting lines like, "Weakness isn't sexy."

Blue is the sort of tragically fragile figure someone like Jean Rhys might have created had she written 50 years later and chosen to focus on the lives of well- dressed, verbally agile gay men orbiting the Manhattan-Fire Island party circuit rather than meek turn-of-the-century waifs searching for love in all the wrong outfits. But for Blue, the narrator and centerpiece of Mark O'Donnell's unusually witty novel Getting Over Homer (Knopf; 193 pages; $21), there is at least hope beyond the sort that a good dose of Zoloft could offer.

We sense this because Blue, a struggling songwriter, is so persevering; he has spent a good chunk of his career composing and producing a musical version of the Odyssey. The title: Odyssey! It's a fitting project. Blue has a free-spirited twin brother named Red ("the most fugitive color") and in essence has spent his romantic life trying to go home, trying to recapture the incomparable bond of his youth. The question that riddles him: "Are twins, or lovers, or while we're at it since I don't know how they're matched up either, figure skating partners, two halves of one thing, or two versions of the same thing?" He never comes to any sound conclusion, but he has plenty of amusingly trenchant insights along the way. "I don't think odd couples are advisable in nonsitcom life," Blue muses, "in situation reality, in science non-fiction." Getting Over Homer is as much a bittersweet love story as it is an homage to the epigram. And it is terrific on both counts.

--G.B.