The Beauty of Men: A Novel [Paperback]

Andrew Holleran (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1997

Lark struggles with his loneliless, his aging, the loss of so many of his friends to AIDS and the obsessive feelings he experiences toward one young man, Becker, who has taken over his dreams. Reprint."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Lake doesn't work and doesn't have friends, a job, or even a first name. All he really has is an abundance of memories of the unsatisfied life of a middle-aged gay man. "I've been a flop as a homosexual," says Lake. The book revolves around Lake's recollection of a time spent lost and hopeless and takes place in Gainesville, Florida, a place as unspectacular as his existence. In this examination of a life given to thinking about worry and lust, Andrew Holleran raises disturbing questions for people of every sexual preference. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Lark, the protagonist of Holleran's profoundly sad, elegant and insightful new novel, his first since Nights in Aruba was published 13 years ago, is virtually unique in today's gay literature: he is a 47-year-old gay man, caring for his quadriplegic mother in a small town in Florida, whose sex life is confined to rest rooms and the baths, who has never come out to his family and whose increasingly empty existence is defined by agonizing loneliness. All the friends from Lark's long-ago glamorous youth in New York are dead of AIDS, and his mother's health has consumed his life as surely as HIV has destroyed the world of Holleran's Dancer from the Dance (1977), one of the classics of gay literature. Age and gray hair have rendered Lark invisible in the sexual competition that defined his life until AIDS, and his mother's impending death has forced him to see that his failure to come out has made him fundamentally invisible to her as well. But Lark, as retrograde and politically incorrect as his life in the closet may make him appear, is nevertheless a chillingly emblematic Everyman, failing to find meaning and purpose in a world devastated by AIDS. Holleran's trademark prose-lush, carefully cadenced and keenly observed-creates a mesmerizingly claustrophobic world where the trapped elderly residents of Lark's mother's nursing home, the lonely men Lark encounters in his fruitless search for love and the overwhelming anonymity of suburban America have equal power to break the heart. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Plume (June 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452277744
• ISBN-13: 978-0452277748
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,325,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An important book but a vexing one, August 15, 1999

By 

Frank ([e-mail]) (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Beauty of Men: A Novel (Paperback)

The first time I read this book, I was moved enough to read it through in one sitting. Re-reading it two years later, I am conflicted about it. It is incredibly well-written, has many crucial observations to make about gay life in the late twentieth century (as Holleran always has), and has a distinctive, authoritative voice. Yet, the same things that will make some readers love this book will make others want to hurl it through a window. The protagonist is unsympathetic, whiny, pretentious, dolorous, self-pitying and even at times self-hating in the extreme, and repetitious (parts of the book feel inadequately edited; you will read certain details in one chapter only to run across them in almost exactly the same guise a chapter later, which appears to be a case of a novel having been cobbled together from what could have more successfully stood as a novella or a group of vignettes). The author tacks on the usual disclaimer about no resemblance between the story being told and events in real life, but an essay he has included in a more recent anthology is a transparent re-write of the same story he tells here, down to the details of dialogue he exchanges with the object of his obsession. Thus, any protest that this is fiction is almost irrelevant. But what the book does do, even if it is not truly a work of fiction, is cast a discerning light on the way a number of men in Holleran's generation, the set of urban gay white men who came of age in the late seventies, view life now that they are no longer the kings of the mountain. The sentimental, often self-indulgent tone of this vantage point will be resonant to some, but to others, particularly those who did not participate in the grand guignol of "Dancer from the Dance," it will grate, and it will sound like a serious case of sour grapes. The essayistic exposition that the narrative breaks into does not help matters. Again, it feels as though parts of this book could have been edited out, parts could have been more successfully trimmed to a novella, and parts could have been more useful as essays. Nonetheless, a lot of what the book says, even if it could be better told, rings shockingly true, and is stark witness to the way gay life continues to be, even at this late date, a life of lies, secrets, and despair for many who live it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oh, so sad; yet frighteningly genuine., February 18, 2000

By 

Douglas Hammerich "Kemmer" (Citrus Heights, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Beauty of Men: A Novel (Paperback)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hauntingly beautiful., November 18, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Hyde Park, UT, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Beauty of Men: A Novel (Paperback)

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.