Customer Reviews

The Dancer from the Dance: A Novel (Plume Contemporary Fiction)

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It seems kind of silly to try to measure, as if it were a science, the precise extent to which a work is a "classic," as many have done here. This is especially true when the work in question is only some 20 years old and the culture producing its critics is both notoriously bitchy and given to dissent. Having said that, far be it from me to hold myself aloof from the fray. Because for all the debate and qualification and feelings of guilt by association this novel seems sometimes to provoke in its readers, it's a classic. There, I've said it--the "c" word. If this book is not in print fifty years from now, we'll have lost what is for late 20th century American gay culture a canonical novel that is, in its own way, every bit as evocative and compelling as the works of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. (The comparison to Fitzgerald is in fact an apt one: this novel resonates with subtle references and allusions to The Great Gatsby--which, fifty years earlier, also documented great big parties frequented by plenty of lost souls on Long Island Sound. I think Holleran very much had Gatsby on his mind when he wrote this novel, and, to his great credit, this story warrants and benefits from the comparison.)

Dancer captures a time and a place and a mood, and it does so with poetry and while telling a hell of a funny, debauched, and crushingly sad, story. Malone and Sutherland are both archetypes and real people, they are Huck and Jim in gay Manhattan, and we care deeply about them. We look forward to seeing what Sutherland will have to say next and to finding out how the beautiful and damned Malone--that über circuit queen--can screw up his life any further. Holleran's Malone and Sutherland are misguided, exaggerated and decadent, and frequently horrible moral role models. And they are all too human.

Let me say this: I personally stopped all of my circuit-like behavior two years ago. I'm 37 and, as many of us know, that's ancient for a gay man. It was unseemly to keep doing what I was doing--something that Sutherland would have understood, even if he wouldn't necessarily have let his age stop him. Dancer from the Dance helped me put closure on that period of my life, my youth, and to do so with grace and a wistful smile and, yes, profound sadness. I don't have the option of getting lost in Long Island Sound. Instead, I did what Nick did at the end of Gatsby: I returned to my Midwestern roots. Knowing that Sutherland and Malone managed to escape that retreat somehow makes my own plight seem less mundane. Dancer From the Dance is a great book with all the hallmarks of a lasting work of literature--and time will have to prove me right on that.

...it would be Andrew Holleran's beautiful, wickedly funny, decadent freshman novel, "Dancer from the Dance". The appelation has been given to many books, but "Dancer" is for me the all-time greatest gay novel. While a plot-and-character summary would make it sound like a narrowly focused, thinly disguised documentary of gay hedonism in pre-AIDS New York City, "Dancer"'s images and dialogue are uniquely evocative and memorable. Holleran's prose has a rare expressive quality, and his descriptions truly haunt the reader.

Guiding the reader through the wreckage and beauty of 1970s New York are two brilliant characters, Malone and Sutherland. Malone is a fallen Adonis, a well-bred WASP young man who, after a moment of unexpected passion in his Manhattan office late one night, begins gorging himself on the overripe fruit of the city's sexual life. After his first romantic disaster, Malone is rescued, taken in, and mentored by the bitchy, high-camp, mad-genius Sutherland. As they careen between raunch and glamour, Sutherland dispenses Wildean aphorisms on life, love, and sex. While every step of the way serving as Sutherland's accomplice in drugs, dishing, discos, and designer demimondes, Malone the whore retains an all-Middle-American vision of finding true love.

Truly, Malone and Sutherland are two of 20th-century literature's most memorable protagonists. But it is Holleran's unparalleled ability to evoke lasting images of New York City during a halcyon period for gay men that makes "Dancer" an unforgettable and absolutely necessary read. If you're gay and have a pulse, read this book.

I've read "Dancer" at least a dozen times and it never fails to provoke both laughter and tears.

Often cited as "the" gay novel of the post-Stonewall generation, "Dancer From the Dance" is a lyrical account of the frenetic life of gay men caught up in the hard-partying "circuit" of Manhattan and Fire Island in the mid-1970's. Hollaran's enigmatic protagonist, Anthony Malone, is a man of nearly unearthly masculine beauty who has left his unloved profession as a lawyer to pursue a life of lust and pleasure in his personal, endless search for love. Poetic, and often moving, the novel paints a colorful picture of a pack of driven hedonists, endlessly in quest of "the perfect man", moving through discos, bars, bathhouses, and parties of almost baroque proportions. The book is levened with comic moments, largely supplied by Sutherland, Malone's outrageous, advice spewing friend, mentor and den mother, who moves effortlessly between the heady worlds of the heterosexual jet set and the gay demimonde. Malone's wistful longing to recapture his one successful male-to-male relationship with the married, violent Frankie is hauntingly described. Overall, a very satisfying novel, vivid and vital despite the passivity of Malone. And the equivocal ending stays with one. Holleran's subsequent books have not been nearly as satisfying, but so profound an impact did "Dancer From the Dance" make on the gay community that, for years after its publication in 1977, anonymous graffiti appeared throughout New York's Greenwich Village, plaintively proclaiming: "Malone Lives!" Read it and see!

I've had the privilege of chairing several literary-discussion groups that dealt with "Dancer from the Dance," one with all gay men, another with gay men and lesbians, a third with straight women. Everybody liked the book, but it means different things to different people. For the generation of gay men born between about 1940 and 1955, it is the story of their life, the pain of coming out and the lyricism of finding that first love as an adult. For younger gay men and lesbians it is partly a period piece but the emotional impact still holds true, as it does for the straight readers.

The novel about the misunderstood, middle-class gay boy who grows up absurd, sublimates himself in a career, and then comes out with a bang in his mid-twenties is a cliche among gay American fiction, but I can think of no books that do it as well as "Dancer from the Dance." To know this book is to love it.

I'd heard about Dancer from the Dance almost from the moment of my coming out. For 19 years I resisted; there just isn't much gay-themed literature that's any good. Dancer is the glorious exception. Beautifully written, and as relevant to the gay-male experience today as it was in the late 70s. More fascinating than the novel's central figure -- Malone, every man's favorite circuit boy -- is the nameless narrator, whom we scarcely come to know. This was an inspired device by Holleran, who recognizes the prospect that any one of us might lose our own identities in the pursuit and adoration of the beautiful Malones.

Where to begin? I've read this book at least six times since that first all-night session in the late seventies and it still gives my heart a pang to look at the original cover. The book works on so many levels that I've never hesitated to recommend/give/nag my straight, gay, and will-bed-anything-that-moves friends into reading it--and they have ALL thanked me for the experience. The achingly rendered images of New York in the seventies--Puerto Rican mothers sitting on the stairs on hot summer nights giving their babies Coca-Cola straight from the bottle, dancing all night at Flamingo then walking home thru the empty skyscrapers on bright Sunday mornings, the way sex feels when it's exactly what you need with exactly the right person. Some people say DFTD is dated, it's pre-AIDS so it's irrelevant, promotes tired gay stereotypes, etc. They fail to recognize that a classic--and this book is one--never goes out of style. It's a beautifully written time capsule of a book that should and will delight readers for many many years to come. Read it.

I read this at age 21, the summer I "came out", floating on an inflatable raft in a swimming pool in San Antonio. It described a world of magic and beauty in New York that I had to become part of, and soon did.

But the book opens with a death. The life of beauty and drugs and disco and dick could easily be seen by an Artist to contain the seeds of its own destruction. And the Death between the lines in hindsight seems a premonition of the AIDS on the way--this was published 3 years before the first cases appeared in the medical literature.

When I re-read it in my thirties, I was shocked at how unattractive this lifestyle seemed, whereas at 21 I just wanted to catch the next plane for Fire Island. But the men portrayed in this novel came of age before homosexuality was de-pathologized in 1973, and decades before it was decriminalized. (Has it been in every state? Probably not.)

And all life and beauty is transient, containing the seeds of its own demise. There is nothing uniquely gay about that fact of life.

Well worth reading for a glimpse into Pleasure Island. This book tells the truth. The prose is beautiful. Purple is a lovely, royal colour.

Holleran is 'old school' gay writer. He can write an excellent gay novel without any graphic sex! The story he tells is everything!
Touching sensitive novel of a man called Malone, who comes from wealth and privilege and carves out a niche for himself as a successful, hardworking lawyer. His work is everything but leaves him empty and alone.
Then one summer, our lonely virgin, Malone, helps a gardener every day after work...and enjoys it. Why then is Malone tearful and mournful when the gardener leaves?
He has an epiphany!! He is gay! This beautiful untouched man decides to experience gay life and gay men. He quits everything and moves to New York.
Malone, (the man who doesn't know how beautiful he is), is an enigma in New York...polite,gay, beautiful,sweet,hot and nice to everyone.

Holleran has a wonderful literary gift of putting out phrases that can sum up the feelings of gay men in terms that are easy to understand.

eg."Remember that the vast majority of homosexuals are looking for a superman to love and find it very difficult to love anyone merely human, which we unfortunately happen to be."

"The point is that we are not doomed because we are homosexual, we are doomed only if we live in despair because of it.."

He describes the life of gays in New York and their favorites haunts where they were happiest..Fire Island in the summer, the Everard Baths, the discoteques before they were discovered, the endless round of parties that you could never go to until at least 2am!

Holleran depends upon his words and turns of phrases to appeal to not only the homosexual but hetero females like me and makes an excellent well-developed story.

I love Holleran's writing! They draw the reader into the enigmatic world of gays...their codes,their lifestlye,their mantra and even their cruelty toward each other.

Sensitive,stunning,cruel,loving..the world of the gay man in 70's New York is not easy..but Malone makes it look easy.

I've never read anything quite like Andrew Holleran's sad and wise masterpiece "Dancer From the Dance." The novel is so rich and textured and filled with such nuance, I've read it no less than six times. There is something for everyone in it regardless of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. Because aren't we, like Malone, all looking for something more? For Malone, it's love and happiness. What could be more universal?

I just reread this book after about 17 years, and I still cannot come to a resolution over the ending. In many ways, it is a wonderfully ambiguous ending, but infuriating at the same time. I keep rereading parts,and looking for clues to the puzzle. Malone represented different things to different people, and consequently, his fate should be open to interpretation. In the end was he just a middle class boy with middle class values, and could not take the guilt of his hedonistic lifestyle, or was he wise and strong enough to know that at 38 the party was over. He was in the process of saying good-bye to New York and his life there, but what are we to make of where he was going? Sutherland's fate was no surprise, he was destined to burn out, not fade away. But Malone always had this sad wistfulness. His endless search for love and beauty was a quest with no chance of fulfillment. Where would someone like him go after New York? As I write this, I am thinking, yes, that swim was his last. It is nice to think he is growing old in a coastal town in Nova Scotia, but somehow, I don't see it. What do others make of the ending and Malone's fate.