Grief

This novel is simply remarkable. I've never before read a book, written by a stranger, that was so clearly my own life story. I've never read Holleran before, and I've never met him, so how does he know all this about me? I have a feeling a lot of us will be saying that when we finish reading GRIEF. My city is New York, not Washington, but otherwise I could be Holleran's unnamed protagonist. I'm a writer, gay, 50, and alone. My family is dead, and I can't count the number of people in my life I've lost to AIDS over the years. I am grieving, not merely for them but for a way of life that has vanished. I've become Holleran's hero--that guy you see in the museum, the theater, the restaurant, always by himself. I'm too young to be so solitary and too old to do anything about it. I am in a state of suspended animation, clinging to my grief, waiting for the courage and motivation to change my fortune. How many of us did I just describe? Well, Andrew Holleran describes all of us. I read a NY Times review of GRIEF the other day, and I immediately bought a copy. This novel speaks for me, and it also makes me feel less alone--there are obviously quite a few of us out here in the dark. Holleran has given us a beautiful voice, and I thank him for it. And now I'm going to read his other books. I want to see more of his biography of me--his biography of all of us.

When Dancer from the Dance was being circulated in the gallies around the 63rd St Y and at The Pines, the electricity it generated was enormous. Someone had captured us just about perfectly. That, in and of itself, was thrilling. Our lives fashioned into art -- something each generation needs and needs to leave behind. But more than that, Holleran caught the yearning for something beyond the effervescent surface of that world. The hero, Malone, walks off into the Bay, having had the three star taste of all there was to taste and still feeling hungry for something he couldn't define. I've always hoped Holleran would write THE gay utopian novel. That he would imagine what we really needed -- the kind of love, the kind of sex, the kind of acceptance and integration into the larger society from birth to death. Instead, he has held our hands as we have walked through the horrors of AIDS and growing old, still trying to imagine what this utopia would be. And yet, I am so grateful for his every word. His books are like an old friend, hovering with me near the coals that keep away the chill and the dark -- keeping me laughing, feeling, yearning, living.

In 1978, Andrew Holleran published his first novel, Dancer from the Dance. It was a breakthrough book, the first novel to get inside the male gay fascination with physical beauty and see it as more than sexual obsession. "The gay Gatsby," critics called it. Actually, it was more --- without knowing it, Holleran was writing an elegy for a generation of gay men that would be wiped out in the '80s by AIDS. "Grief" is a novel about a survivor of that era. Most of the narrator's friends are dead. He's just spent twelve years doing not much more than visit his mother in a Florida nursing home, and now she's also gone on to that place from whence none return. Grieving and adrift, he goes to Washington, D.C., where he'll teach a college seminar, "Literature and AIDS." He rents a room in the large home of a gay man who's also deep into middle age, and there the novel stops. That's right. Stops. On page 7. For the narrator finds on his bedside table a book of Mary Todd Lincoln's letters, and he can't put it down. Lincoln's book is a record of unending grief and a chronicle of its devastating effect on her life --- what she felt after her husband's assassination is something like what the narrator is feeling after his mother's death. The conversations in "Grief" --- mostly between the narrator and his hermit of a landlord --- are about grief. Is it useless? (The dead don't know you're grieving.) Do you get over it? (Why should you? "It's the only thing left of that person.") You may think this is morbid stuff, but Holleran is a casual, seductive writer --- these conversations seem totally normal. And there's lots of that humor which, rightly or wrongly, gets a "gay" label: "You don't know what D.C. was like during the eighties. Funerals, funerals, funerals! I got my suntan one summer from just standing in Rock Creek Cemetery.") The narrator takes long walks and describes them. He offers a blow-by-blow account of Mary Lincoln's travails. He attends concerts at museums. He has dinner with the mother of one of his dead friends. His landlord urges him to buy a house in Washington, to rejoin humanity just that much. The college term ends. He goes back to Florida. The last sentence of the book is a shocker. It's completely correct --- everything in the book points to it --- but it's exactly what, in spite of everything, you don't believe is coming. But then, most of the book has that quality of surprise: You're reading about a guy who's frozen in grief, whose life is behind him, whose best friends are long gone. There's everything conventional about the way the story is told and nothing conventional about the story itself. And yet you keep trying to make it make sense, as if the narrator is a guest on "Will & Grace." "Grief," five years in the writing, is just 150 pages long. That's not a novel, it's a situation. And yet the main character, in trying to erase himself, is unforgettable. The questions the book asks will nag at you for a long time.

With a title like "Grief" one could reasonably expect a maudlin and depressing work of fiction. However, this latest offering from author Andrew Holleran, one of our most gifted chroniclers of the gay experience, is both elegiac and strangely optimistic at the same time. Beginning with "Dancer from the Dance" in 1978, and continuing through the plague years with "Nights in Aruba" (novel), "Ground Zero" (essays), "The Beauty of Men" (novel) and, most recently, "In September the Light Changes" (stories), Holleran has developed a well earned reputation for addressing the needs and concerns of an aging homosexual population. His characters are survivors - not just of the AIDS scourge, but of an era of epic homophobia, intolerance and what was once referred to as the homosexual lifestyle (a repressive existence of closets, secrets and anonymous sex). "Grief" follows our protagonist from his Gainesville home to Washington, D. C. where he has accepted a University post as guest lecturer on the Literature of AIDS. Having recently buried his invalid mother, our lonely middle-aged hero rents a room from a dapper civil servant who also deals in antiques. The two men fall into a quiet and cordial domesticity without ever forging any sort of intimate or lasting bond. For friendship he turns to his old acquaintance Frank, likewise a survivor, but one willing to embrace and exploit whatever life has left to offer. Finally there is a beautifully articulated encounter with the aged mother of a friend lost twenty years ago to AIDS. Alone in his room he discovers a book of letters by Mary Todd Lincoln, whose documented grief stricken final years prove allegorical to this narrative. What does the individual who has outlived his family, friends and "lifestyle" live for, and isn't grief the only appropriate response? Andrew Holleran's novel is a beautiful prose poem, a masterful and economical rumination on the nature and meaning of love, loss and, finally, grief.

Few writers have meant more to me than Andrew Holleran but I'd understand if what you thought while reading his new novel is that this Holleran guy really needs to get laid. His relentless acquiescence to solitude can be maddening. That's always been the case---on the page at least, he comes across as a man who nurtures his losses more than one should, and a man terrified of romantic intimacy, and yet, there is, at the exact same time, a breathtaking purity to his melancholy. And let's face it (he has)---not all gay men end up with a "partner", and a house to refurbish, and an adopted child in the back seat. And for those like Holleran (and Larry Kramer), who came of age in the heyday of '70s gay New York, only to lose 4 out of 5 of their friends to AIDS, in what must have felt like the blink of an eye, perpetual grief may be the only rational, truly human response. In this novella, "Grief", which seems to me as essential and indelible a book as Isherwood's "A Single Man", Holleran walks and walks around Washington D.C., as he once walked round his parent's Florida town, observing the life around him and wondering if and when and how he should re-enter its flow. (As you order "Grief", you really should order too a used copy of his magnificent but sadly out-of-print essay collection, "Ground Zero".) Holleran's cursed with the gift for observation, which may mean that he'll always be walking alone down those streets, but we're lucky that he keeps sending back these reports, much of which, it's worth noting, is quite funny. I've been reading this book aloud and emailing passages to friends for two days now. His voice fills my head and calms my addled heart. I wish he still wrote his monthly column because I think he might just be our Thoreau.