The motionlessness of Andrew Holleran’s novels mirrors an experience, shared by all his protagonists, of being stuck, unable to begin a responsible, adult life.
In 1978, two novels appeared that covered remarkably similar, and largely unexplored, territory, documenting the drug-addled, sex-crazed circuit of bathhouses, dance clubs, and parties that, in the seventies, shuttled gay men between Manhattan and Fire Island, with occasional forays to San Francisco or the more exotic wilds of Brooklyn and Queens.
The protagonist’s mother is the most vivid presence in these books. In “Nights in Aruba,” she is a bored, imperious, heavily drinking housewife, who insists that her young son stay with her while she finishes a final drink. “You don’t love me,” she accuses the boy—one of many instances of mild, commonplace, devastating abuse. And yet he recognizes her, even in this early novel, as “the last faithful love I would have.
Holleran’s most successful novels take a particular period—six indistinguishable years in “Dancer,” a semester in his 2006 novel, “Grief”—and bottle it, tilting it this way and that, letting time drift and double back. In a novel, exposition typically supplements scene, but Holleran inverts that hierarchy. In “Dancer,” we are not shown particular evenings as much as we are told what the baths, clubs, and parties were generally like.
The book’s longest section, “Hurricane Weather,” recounts the narrator’s relationship with Earl, his only friend in town. They first meet at the local boat ramp, a cruising spot that the narrator of “The Beauty of Men” spends much of his time haunting but which has since been ruined by police surveillance and online personals.
There are the makings here of a melodrama like the ones that Earl and the narrator enjoy watching. But these elements remain inert. Narrative is ordinarily created by the disruption of a status quo; Holleran seems to want a novel that is all status quo, no disruption. We are left with what he has called, in an essay, “the actual dull reality of life, its longueurs and nagging angst.