Holleran has reached ‘the end of the arc’
Author touches on universal themes of loss and transience of life in latest novel
Death has always been on Andrew Holleran’s mind.
It loomed over the shame and hedonism of “Dancer From the Dance,” his 1978 debut novel and one of the most famous works of gay literature, and has pervaded his books since: A small body of work traces the arc of life.
At 77, and releasing his first novel in more than 15 years, Holleran feels as if he has reached “the end of the arc,” he said recently. So it’s appropriate that in “The Kingdom of Sand” — recently released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux — death is the subject.
“But isn’t everyone obsessed with death?” Holleran, whose real name is Eric Garber, asked during an interview from his home near Gainesville, Florida. “We all think about the transitory nature of life.”
“The Kingdom of Sand” follows a natural thematic progression for him. After “Dancer” came the ambivalent adulthood of “Nights in Aruba” (1983), the AIDS crisis loneliness of “The Beauty of Men” (1996) and the parental loss of “Grief ” (2006). Now, Holleran has written a novel preoccupied with twilight and letting go, while doubling as a portrait of place, assembled from sketches of life in Florida. At its core is the account of a late-inlife friendship between the unnamed narrator and an elusive older man named Earl, whose protracted death takes up the bulk of the book.
If “Grief ” was a farewell to the generation of Holleran’s parents, said Will Schwalbe, Holleran’s editor, here, “there’s this feeling that we’re up next.”
Few have examined loss with the lyricism and sensitive observation that have been hallmarks of Holleran’s novels. Larry Kramer, author and prickly luminary of AIDS activism who died in 2020, once called him the F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway of gay literature, “but for one thing: He writes better than both of them.”
That’s an opinion most likely to come from a gay reader, though. Critics and publishers, often with more than a whiff of homophobia, were slow to acknowledge and appreciate chroniclers of gay life such as Holleran. As recently as “Grief,” a The New York Times reviewer wrote that his books “can seem so determined to speak for their disenfranchised gay characters that the works become inaccessible to anyone else.”
Holleran — unlike, say, Truman Capote or Gore Vidal in the generation before him — has never tailored his writing to a straight audience. Fire Island culture is described without context; camp and cruising are a given. But his works are inarguably literature, said Tony Kushner, playwright of “Angels in America.”
Beyond the “clarity that lives alongside a musicality” in Holleran’s novels, Kushner said, is a universality redolent of Fitzgerald, as Kramer claimed.
“Fitzgerald is also a writer about loss; there’s this sense with both of people inhabiting something that’s already disappeared,” he said. “One of the first things I remember about ‘Dancer From the Dance’ is that it lands on the notion that all of us are self-invented people, and that behind that is a difficult and somewhat concealed past, as if in coming out, there’s a reverse closeting that’s very Fitzgeraldian.”
Even if that point hasn’t always registered with a wide audience, Holleran has meant an immense deal to gay people of all ages. It’s not unusual to see a Fire Island neophyte clutching a copy of “Dancer” on the ferry from Sayville, New York, as if reading it were a rite of passage.
“Andrew really is the standard-bearer of taking all of our wayward contemporary gay desires and internal melodramas and making them not only legible but beautiful,” said William Johnson, program director of PEN Across America and former deputy director of Lambda Literary. “I think that is why young folks are still so drawn to him and his work. It is his ability to make our ‘gay’ feelings so evocative.”
Holleran didn’t set out to establish such a reputation. The material of “Dancer” arose from a moment of frustration. By his late 20s, he was a Master of Fine Arts graduate with one published story. “You’d better quit now and get a real job,” he recalled thinking. But at the time, he was away from New York City for a stretch and writing “really campy” letters to a friend there. “Andrew is a master of the art of a letter,” Schwalbe said.
In “The Kingdom of Sand,” he conjures the flatness of Florida and remarks that you know you’ve been in the state too long when “you no longer go to the beach.” It is also an environment that he portrays as marked by decay. He refers to Gainesville as a “city of hospitals, nursing homes and crematoria.” We live on, he said, as the things we give away, such as a lamp of Earl’s that takes on the role of a memorial.
Amid those observations, Holleran’s protagonist reckons with the bodily changes of old age.
These characters, he said, are “post-sex.” Instead, they mostly watch movies. Death, in the case of Earl, can be a banal, slow decline. There is a uniquely gay shame in relying on the help of others, yet worrying that an unreturned call from a handyman is an act of homophobia.
“What drives me in what I write,” Holleran said, “is to write the thing that is not being said. You always want to write a book where you get everything out. But the downside of that is: What do you do next?”
It’s possible that life’s arc extends beyond “The Kingdom of Sand.” Holleran said he is “neither that old nor young.” And if there’s more to write, it’s about the pleasure — rather than the pain — of his age.
“Of course there’s panic and serious thinking about how to die,” he said. “But there’s also the desire to remain in life and continue enjoying its wonders. It’s a combination of high anxiety and tranquility — and pleasure in small things.”