In the tradition of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, a beautiful novel destined to become a classic
Reeling from the recent death of his invalid mother, a worn, jaded professor comes to our nation’s capital to recuperate from his loss. What he finds there -- in his repressed, lonely landlord, in the city’s mood and architecture, and in the letters and journals of Mary Todd Lincoln -- shows him new, poignant truths about America, yearning, loneliness, and mourning itself.
Since Andrew Holleran first burst onto the scene with 1978’s groundbreaking Dancer from the Dance, which has been continuously in print, he has been dazzling readers and critics with his haunting, brilliant prose. The Publishing Triangle ranks Dancer from the Dance at #15 on its list of the 100 best lesbian and gay novels ever, along with titles by Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. A new Andrew Holleran book is a major literary event; with Grief, Holleran is poised to reach a wider audience than ever before.
Andrew Holleran may not be the most prolific writer on the scene ('The Beauty of Men', 'In September, the Light Changes', 'Dancer from the Dance', 'Nights in Aruba') but he most assuredly one of our finest. His extraordinarily well-crafted novels, novellas, and short stories can be appreciated on many levels - interest of theme (Holleran is one of the few writers who find writing about gay life as natural a topic for creating universal themes as any other), quality of prose (liquid, rich in imagery and atmosphere, and creatively eloquent), and pertinence of philosophy.
In a brief 150 pages Holleran relates via an unnamed narrator the experiences of life in its brevity and death in its finality. Having moved from Florida where he had been the caretaker of his ill mother with whom he never discussed his life as a gay man and suffers from her loss as well as his own regret that he never allowed his mother to know him, our narrator accepts a university job in Washington, DC teaching a seminar on AIDS and its impact on literature. He rents a room from a middle-aged gay man whose home on Dupont Circle has seen a failed relationship and whose presence is absence: these two men avoid communication that might uncover secrets painfully buried in each man's private grief. Aside from his teaching and occasional walking (Washington has rarely been so beautifully described in words of a novel) and talking with an old friend, his only activity is reading the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln written after the death of the President, pages that mirror the life and times of the men who populate this story.
There is no true beginning or end in this treatise on the sanctity of life, yet it allows Holleran to interject some of the more slowly meaningful passages he has yet written. In referring to his landlord 'the problem was that we were both too polite. Manners are counterproductive when they make you wonder about a person's true feelings'. In describing the nation's capital as a living space '...Washington, I thought, where life was so comfortable because it was so artificial, as if living under a glass roof, or in some parlor where a boy was laid amidst the lilies'. And 'At every concert...there was a piece - sometimes only a passage - that made you feel someone else (the composer) has understood, had known, your grief, that life was worth living because of music. At the same time, this music...also made it clear that you had been fooling yourself in attempting to go on with your life...'.
And yet Holleran has not written a book about terminal depression. In the end he quotes the mother of one of his friends who'd died from AIDS: ('How do you make amends when the person you wronged is dead?') 'I suppose by doing something good to those who are still alive. I think often of a line from Sophocles - we have all eternity to please the dead, but only a little while to love the living.' And the sweet brevity of life glows in Holleran's words. This is not only a fine work of literature: this is also incandescent writing about living. And it is one of the finer books of the year. Grady Harp
