The Beauty of Men

Holleran, Andrew. "The Beauty of Men", Plume Reprint. 1997. The Beauty of Feelings Amos Lassen and Literary Pride I read "The Beauty of Men" when it first came out and I was then reviewing for a paper in New Orleans. I was "wowed" by it and after conducting a phone interview with Andrew Holleran, the author, I found that the book spoke to me even more, Holleran knows how to touch a reader, how to use feeling in a book that makes the reader identify with what is going on in his books. When I read his new book "Grief" I was so stunned by it that I had to sit back and contemplate my life and re-evaluate what I was doing. Both "Grief" and "The Beauty of Men" caused me to accept the fact that even though I am no longer young, there is still a lot of me to give and there is still a lot to be done. Holleran manages to capture feelings beautifully. The angst that we as older gay men feel has never seemed so real as it is when I read Holleran. The same can be said for the way he deals with hopelessness and sadness. In "The Beauty of Men', we have the painful story of Lark who is a survivor. He is alive after AIDS has decimated the gay population and more importantly, his group of friends. It is a dark and brooding book on what being an aging gay man is all about. All of us are aware that today's culture is youth oriented and good looks play an important role in all that we do. The eloquence of Holleran's prose as he relates the loneliness and the feelings of emptiness of gay middle-aged men who have survived their friends is so beautiful and so real that it is hard to read him without a tear. Even more interesting is the realization of Lark that it is not only AIDS that has changed gay America but also the fact that his generation is due to be replaced by a more vibrant one; a generation of beautiful young men. Yet it is important to note that this is only one view of the future for gays in the world--one that, as beautifully written about as it is, I do not really want to be a part of. The story is painful and as we read of the emptiness of Lark's life and read of his self exploration, we feel the limbo that he feels he has reached. Because he is lonely, he looks for relief at a restroom on a local boat ramp and in fantasizing of a relationship with a guy he once had a one night stand with. As easily read as this book is, it is compelling and important and it is not all drab. There are moments of comic genius that often temper Lark's profound sense of loss. Personally, as much as I identified with Lark, I did not like him very much. His self imposed existence in a nether world where he feels he can never again feel comfort or solace by the touch of another human is something I do not want to identify with. He leads a life that is less than idealistic. As he looks back on his life, Lark finds that it isn't what he wanted it to be and when he realizes that each person he has known is just another part of society who draws his own self-esteem from it,

As a post-epidemic work, some might find this book either irrelevant or a curiosity from another age. It is most emphatically neither. While many younger gay readers will possibly fail to grasp the pathos of the subject's life, a very large part of that life has been painfully lived down to the last detail by those of us gay men above the age of 50. Indeed it became so painfully real in places, that I was tempted to put it down; however Holleran's crystalline insights and observations drew me further and further into the story to the extent that quitting it became immpossible. For these insights/observations and his delightful command of the language, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Holleran's gift as a writer does not lie soley in his ability to tell whatever story he chooses in beautiful prose, but also in his gift for creating probative story lines. This is best exemplified in his last novel, The Beauty of Men. This book has received a somewhat cold reception from some gay men and gay reviewers, who in a post-AIDS world where political correctness and breeder-wannabeism are touted as the outer limits of thinking about the experience of being a gay male, seem to feel betrayed by his exploration. I think that The Beauty of Men covers some of the same terrain that Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties did, and Holleran's attempt to work the gay vein of it has been a success. If you're looking for gay agitprop or a gay role model, this book is not for you. On the other hand, if you are interested in reading what one fine author has to say about a lot of life's vexing questions Holleran's book deserves a reading.

Andrew Holleran usually chooses an elegiac tone for his writing, and this novel is no exception. Lark, living in exile in Florida, visits his elderly, infirm mother almost daily in her nursing home, brings her home on occasional weekends, and mourns for the lost, fast-lane life of 1970s New York and his friends from that time, most of whom have died since he moved to this small, rural town. Lark also pursues an unrequited, somewhat imaginary relationship with Becker, a man some 15 years younger whom Lark picked up once at a local boat ramp. Some critics have accused this novel of employing self-pity and pathos--Lark does have a rather negative self-image and he persists in mooning over Becker when most would have written off that affair with disgust--but the writing is gorgeous. Holleran is peerless (among the gliterati, anyway) with his evocations of time and place. One can smell northern Florida's pine forests and hear the wind through the branches just as one can smell the unpleasantly antiseptic nursing home and hear its senile chatter. Holleran's wit veers toward the sarcastic, but he's often dead-on hilarious, as in the chapter entitled "Il Paradisio," where Lark ventures into a bathhouse. I recommend this book for anyone who likes tight, concise yet lush writing--and doesn't expect a political manifesto in a novel.

To read Andrew Holleran's books is to want to know who he is and why he writes. Are his works autobiographical? With other novels I'm not interested necessarily in the writer's own life. Why is it, then, that this reader wonders and why is it important? In The Beauty of Men, with its hauntingly beautiful prose, Holleran writes what life has become for Lark, the main character, living in Florida in the 1990s. With sickness and death all around him, he seeks sanctuary for his grief, while worrying about aging and his success or failure as a homosexual. Holleran,in this and his other works, effectively draws the reader into the dream of his writing and story. By the end of the book, you feel as though you've just read a long letter from a friend you haven't heard from in a long time, describing what life's been like over the past few years. I think it's this intimacy that Holleran creates in all of his books which is the key to the question. As in Dancer from the Dance, you want to learn more about the novelist. If you haven't read Holleran's other novels, I would recommend reading them in order before reading The Beauty of Men. Holleran may just be at a point where critics talk about his oeuvre, though I hope this novel isn't his last.