Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A near perfect prose work., June 7, 2006
This review is from: Grief (Hardcover)
With a title like "Grief" one could reasonably expect a maudlin and depressing work of fiction. However, this latest offering from author Andrew Holleran, one of our most gifted chroniclers of the gay experience, is both elegiac and strangely optimistic at the same time. Beginning with "Dancer from the Dance" in 1978, and continuing through the plague years with "Nights in Aruba" (novel), "Ground Zero" (essays), "The Beauty of Men" (novel) and, most recently, "In September the Light Changes" (stories), Holleran has developed a well earned reputation for addressing the needs and concerns of an aging homosexual population. His characters are survivors - not just of the AIDS scourge, but of an era of epic homophobia, intolerance and what was once referred to as the homosexual lifestyle (a repressive existence of closets, secrets and anonymous sex). "Grief" follows our protagonist from his Gainesville home to Washington, D. C. where he has accepted a University post as guest lecturer on the Literature of AIDS. Having recently buried his invalid mother, our lonely middle-aged hero rents a room from a dapper civil servant who also deals in antiques. The two men fall into a quiet and cordial domesticity without ever forging any sort of intimate or lasting bond. For friendship he turns to his old acquaintance Frank, likewise a survivor, but one willing to embrace and exploit whatever life has left to offer. Finally there is a beautifully articulated encounter with the aged mother of a friend lost twenty years ago to AIDS. Alone in his room he discovers a book of letters by Mary Todd Lincoln, whose documented grief stricken final years prove allegorical to this narrative. What does the individual who has outlived his family, friends and "lifestyle" live for, and isn't grief the only appropriate response? Andrew Holleran's novel is a beautiful prose poem, a masterful and economical rumination on the nature and meaning of love, loss and, finally, grief.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Treatise On Grief, June 8, 2006
This review is from: Grief (Hardcover)
The narrator in Andrew Holleran's sparse novella (150 pages) at the suggestion of a old friend Frank, goes to Washington, D. C. for a semester to teach literature in an unnamed school and rents a room in a row house from an unnamed landlord-- although we do know that his dog is named Biscuit. The narrator has been in Gainesville, Florida for the last twelve years, taking care of a mother in a nursing home. She has recently died; and he is dealing with her death in addition to being a lonely survivor of the AIDS epidemic that swept the U. S. in the early 80's-- thus the title GRIEF. I have read practically everything Mr. Holleran ever wrote, including his many incisive columns over the years in CHRISTOPHER STREET. Along with Edmund White, Paul Russell and Colm Toibin, he is one of a small number of authors writing about the gay experience whom I will always read. He writes beautiful, descriptive prose and gives a myriad of details about his three main characters as well as the City of Washington that the narrator doesn't like very much. Holleran makes the landlord come alive: "He had his house, he had his friends, his WILL & GRACE-- and that was it. At fifty-five things had stopped happening to him, I suspected. Nothing happened to him anymore. Or rather: Everything that did had already happened before-- many, many times. . . He reminded me of an older America that had never changed its values of thrift, cleanliness, and order; the only difference was that he was homosexual. . . The homosexual part, however, was now inactive. He was now a sort of homosexual emeritus." We also learn that the landlord was more attractive now than when he was younger, although his face indicates that "his looks had not brought him peace of mind." He also cooks a lot of chicken parts at one time and throws them in the refrigerator to eat on an unchanging nightly schedule. The narrator fares every worse. He discovers a book in his room of the life and letters of Mary Todd Lincoln and spends a great amount of his free time-- which he has a lot of-- reading the letters and comparing her grief, after the death of Lincoln, to his. Holleran, through the narrator, speaks eloquently and often on the subject of grief although he adds little new on the subject. (On the other hand, perhaps there is nothing new to say.) The only cure for grief is time, but some people need more time than others and some people never get over a loss; if they stop grieving, they no longer have that loved one. (Emily Dickinson said it all in one phrase: "sorrow has its own season.") And that the dead live in our hearts. And that often the living feel guilty for surviving. The narrrator also carries the burden of knowing that he did not honor his mother's request to be taken home from the nursing home to die, in her own bedroom, surrounding by her own furniture, and that he never told her he was homosexual, even when she asked. (It seems he just got telephone calls only from men.) Those of us who lived through the horrors of the early years of the AIDS epidemic (the character Frank describes Washington in the eighties as "like a very nice dinner party with friends, except some of them were taken out and shot while the rest of us were expected to go on eating") certainly can see glimpses of our friends and ourselves in these characters. On the other hand, I would hope that many of us have tried to move on from our grief-- although we never want to forget those we have lost-- and as Milton would say, go on to pastures new. That is not to say, however, that GRIEF is not worth reading, along with Christopher Isherwood's brilliant novel, A SINGLE MAN, and Joan Didion's YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING if you want more on the subject of grief.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Story of Our Lives, July 31, 2006
This review is from: Grief (Hardcover)
This novel is simply remarkable. I've never before read a book, written by a stranger, that was so clearly my own life story. I've never read Holleran before, and I've never met him, so how does he know all this about me? I have a feeling a lot of us will be saying that when we finish reading GRIEF. My city is New York, not Washington, but otherwise I could be Holleran's unnamed protagonist. I'm a writer, gay, 50, and alone. My family is dead, and I can't count the number of people in my life I've lost to AIDS over the years. I am grieving, not merely for them but for a way of life that has vanished. I've become Holleran's hero--that guy you see in the museum, the theater, the restaurant, always by himself. I'm too young to be so solitary and too old to do anything about it. I am in a state of suspended animation, clinging to my grief, waiting for the courage and motivation to change my fortune. How many of us did I just describe? Well, Andrew Holleran describes all of us. I read a NY Times review of GRIEF the other day, and I immediately bought a copy. This novel speaks for me, and it also makes me feel less alone--there are obviously quite a few of us out here in the dark. Holleran has given us a beautiful voice, and I thank him for it. And now I'm going to read his other books. I want to see more of his biography of me--his biography of all of us.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192250339_.gif){kind=small}
