In his first novel in almost 15 years, Andrew Holleran undertakes the daunting task of making paralysis -- both physical and emotional -- seem dramatic and interesting. It's on the strength of his lively, intricate prose and sharp observations that he succeeds at all, for The Beauty of Men is a sad and gloomy novel whose main character, Lark, alternately depresses and exasperates.

Lark is a healthy, closeted gay male in his late 40s who feels guilty that all of his friends have died of AIDS while he has remained HIV negative. A former New Yorker whose life revolved around parties and sex in the 1970s, Lark now lives in Gainesville, Florida, where for the last 12 years he has cared for his quadriplegic mother. He spends his free time going to the baths in Jacksonville and cruising the public restroom at a boat ramp, hoping to see Becker, the handsome younger man with whom Lark has become infatuated. As Lark drives to and from the nursing home every day, he remembers his dead friends and laments the loss of his youth and looks and ability to attract sexual partners.

While this synopsis may sound uninspiring, Holleran has never been a writer who depended on plot or action to carry his fiction. In his lyrical and dizzying Dancer from the Dance, he fashioned a mosaic of fantastic incidents and magical details that transformed hedonistic gay New Yorkers circa 1977 into doomed and tragic figures with their own mythologies and sacred sexualities. Holleran's second novel, Nights in Aruba, juxtaposed the narrator's urban adult life in New York and idyllic childhood in the Caribbean to create a strangely wistful tension that moved the book forward. The Beauty of Men uses similar techniques and themes, but whereas Holleran's previous novels left one exhilarated, his latest exudes despair and pessimism that some readers might mistake for a jaded whine.

It's easy to understand why Lark feels so alone and disenfranchised. Every day he sees the humiliations of old age at the nursing home, while in his personal life he imagines that men reject or ignore him because he no longer fits some artificial standard of youthful attractiveness. Every day he remembers his dead friends and dwells on how pointless their lives have been. He clings to the hope that a one-night stand with Becker will blossom into a romance, but as the months drag on without a word from Becker, Lark understands he's been rejected yet again. His only happiness occurs at the boat ramp, where the thrill and possibilities of sexual encounters alternate with solitary moments of grace as he contemplates sunlight coming through the public restroom's windows.

What saves the book from being merely a collection of morose set pieces is Holleran's eye for detail and his genius with description. Gainesville and the surrounding countryside are rendered with a poetic precision that momentarily lifts the story out of its despair. Two lighted windows take on enormous significance during Lark's pathetic and heartbreaking drives past Becker's house. Even Lark's pessimistic musings are full of interesting and unusual takes on banal subjects.

Yet it's these very qualities of intelligence and insight that also make Lark frustrating. He's able to understand why he feels the way he does, to analyze and comment on his follies, but he is incapable of doing anything to relieve his horrible loneliness and of despair. Nothing anyone can say to him, nothing anyone can do will help him. He is as paralyzed as his mother. It's a realistic depiction, but exasperating as well. Lark comments that "when people get depressed, they lose their personalities, they lose all the qualities that made you love them -- the wit, vitality, sense of humor, smarts. They just become Sad. Sadness is uniform; it excludes all other qualities." While he is actually explaining what led to a friend's suicide, Lark could just as well be speaking about himself.

Holleran has thankfully created a large cast of supporting and minor characters whose personalities, unlike Lark's, have not yet been lost. Lark's remembrances of his New York friends are funny and painful, recalling the memorable cameos of characterization found in Dancer from the Dance. Lark's mother is also beautifully drawn, a woman whose happy normal life has gradually collapsed into "a precursor of purgatory." Even the regulars at the boat ramp restroom and the patrons of the Jacksonville baths, as brief as their appearances are, seem intriguing.

Ultimately, though, what remains after finishing The Beauty of Men is a feeling of despair. Events take place in Lark's life, but nothing really changes. And while Lark's dark, sad laments about aging and homosexuality are occasionally balanced by characters with more common sense and less self pity, it's Lark who takes center stage and makes it clear that life comes down to losing your hair, losing your friends, and losing your capacity to hope.