There's a funny, telling scene early in Mark Matousek's new memoir, in which the hopeful young writer, newly hired at Interview magazine in the early 1980s, is taken to meet its then-editor, Robert Hayes. "You're a writer?" Hayes asks. "Nobody writes here. Nobody even reads. . . We illustrate pictures." Matousek's head is given another spin when he is ushered into the presence of Interview's founder and presiding paleface, Andy Warhol. Matousek gawks at Warhol's "shiny, plasticized skin," and when the two shake hands Matousek gets the willies. "When I took the limp [hand], it was strangely mushy -- like boiled chicken -- and felt as if the skin would come sliding off the bone if I pulled too hard."

The first sections of "Sex Death Enlightenment" are full of similarly sharp, vivid observations about the New York magazine world, where Matousek -- a naive Jewish kid from the 'burbs -- spent several years as a senior editor at Interview. But what this book is really about is Matousek's eventual disenchantment with New York's "self-satisfied nihilism." When a former lover discovers he has AIDS, Matousek realizes that he himself was "scared of dying this way -- as the person I was at that moment, cynical and living a lie."

Matousek abandons New York, first with a novelist friend and later alone, in search of deeper spiritual truths. The second half of this book, in which he details his (very) extensive search for meaning, is likely to divide readers. Some will find it honest and moving; others will want to fling "Sex Death Enlightenment" vigorously across the room. I found myself more often in the second camp; this all got awfully touchy-feely awfully quickly. The book becomes a kind of New Age travelogue as Matousek careens from Zen monasteries to Buddhist retreats to yoga weekends to kundalini initiations. He begins seeing apparitions and experiences something he calls "a waking trance." His search becomes more frantic when he discovers that he himself is HIV positive.

None of this would be troubling if Matousek's prose weren't also so soft and Zen-inflected ("The breeze itself seemed alive, intelligent"), and if he didn't include sections like the one on his suddenly "remembered" sexual abuse at the hands of his parents. The book is quite moving in some of its final scenes, as Matousek cares for a dying friend, and it's easy to see how people suffering from serious illness might take comfort in Matousek's searching and his final ability to, as he puts it, "be a child again." The book may leave others, however, feeling even more cynical, and wondering if one need sacrifice so much of the intellect in order to feel human and whole.

-- Dwight Garner