With writers and publishers working at their own, inscrutable paces, maybe it's the zeitgeist that is responsible for the spate of absorbing recent novels postulated on filling in the blanks in the biographies of actual gay men. They're kin to physicists' transfixing recent pictures of black holes. Christopher Castellani's deeply felt new "Leading Men" (Viking) exhibits another compelling aurora.

Castellani closes one of the few gaps in the memoirs and subsequent biographies of Tennessee Williams with his novel's structurally central, indelibly hallucinatory episode. His novel's larger subject, however, is the 15 years during which the Italian-American Frank Merlo was Williams' lover, companion, caretaker and, ultimately, cancer-ridden cast-off.