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Grief

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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.

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.

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.

When Dancer from the Dance was being circulated in the gallies around the 63rd St Y and at The Pines, the electricity it generated was enormous. Someone had captured us just about perfectly. That, in and of itself, was thrilling. Our lives fashioned into art -- something each generation needs and needs to leave behind. But more than that, Holleran caught the yearning for something beyond the effervescent surface of that world. The hero, Malone, walks off into the Bay, having had the three star taste of all there was to taste and still feeling hungry for something he couldn't define. I've always hoped Holleran would write THE gay utopian novel. That he would imagine what we really needed -- the kind of love, the kind of sex, the kind of acceptance and integration into the larger society from birth to death. Instead, he has held our hands as we have walked through the horrors of AIDS and growing old, still trying to imagine what this utopia would be. And yet, I am so grateful for his every word. His books are like an old friend, hovering with me near the coals that keep away the chill and the dark -- keeping me laughing, feeling, yearning, living.

In 1978, Andrew Holleran published his first novel, Dancer from the Dance. It was a breakthrough book, the first novel to get inside the male gay fascination with physical beauty and see it as more than sexual obsession. "The gay Gatsby," critics called it. Actually, it was more --- without knowing it, Holleran was writing an elegy for a generation of gay men that would be wiped out in the '80s by AIDS.

"Grief" is a novel about a survivor of that era. Most of the narrator's friends are dead. He's just spent twelve years doing not much more than visit his mother in a Florida nursing home, and now she's also gone on to that place from whence none return. Grieving and adrift, he goes to Washington, D.C., where he'll teach a college seminar, "Literature and AIDS."

He rents a room in the large home of a gay man who's also deep into middle age, and there the novel stops. That's right. Stops. On page 7. For the narrator finds on his bedside table a book of Mary Todd Lincoln's letters, and he can't put it down. Lincoln's book is a record of unending grief and a chronicle of its devastating effect on her life --- what she felt after her husband's assassination is something like what the narrator is feeling after his mother's death.

The conversations in "Grief" --- mostly between the narrator and his hermit of a landlord --- are about grief. Is it useless? (The dead don't know you're grieving.) Do you get over it? (Why should you? "It's the only thing left of that person.") You may think this is morbid stuff, but Holleran is a casual, seductive writer --- these conversations seem totally normal. And there's lots of that humor which, rightly or wrongly, gets a "gay" label: "You don't know what D.C. was like during the eighties. Funerals, funerals, funerals! I got my suntan one summer from just standing in Rock Creek Cemetery.")

The narrator takes long walks and describes them. He offers a blow-by-blow account of Mary Lincoln's travails. He attends concerts at museums. He has dinner with the mother of one of his dead friends. His landlord urges him to buy a house in Washington, to rejoin humanity just that much. The college term ends. He goes back to Florida.

The last sentence of the book is a shocker. It's completely correct --- everything in the book points to it --- but it's exactly what, in spite of everything, you don't believe is coming. But then, most of the book has that quality of surprise: You're reading about a guy who's frozen in grief, whose life is behind him, whose best friends are long gone. There's everything conventional about the way the story is told and nothing conventional about the story itself. And yet you keep trying to make it make sense, as if the narrator is a guest on "Will & Grace."

"Grief," five years in the writing, is just 150 pages long. That's not a novel, it's a situation. And yet the main character, in trying to erase himself, is unforgettable. The questions the book asks will nag at you for a long time. And so, although you can't quite figure out why, you'll push "Grief" on older friends. Because there's just no way around it --- Andrew Holleran is one of America's smartest and most accomplished writers.

Few writers have meant more to me than Andrew Holleran but I'd understand if what you thought while reading his new novel is that this Holleran guy really needs to get laid. His relentless acquiescence to solitude can be maddening. That's always been the case---on the page at least, he comes across as a man who nurtures his losses more than one should, and a man terrified of romantic intimacy, and yet, there is, at the exact same time, a breathtaking purity to his melancholy. And let's face it (he has)---not all gay men end up with a "partner", and a house to refurbish, and an adopted child in the back seat. And for those like Holleran (and Larry Kramer), who came of age in the heyday of '70s gay New York, only to lose 4 out of 5 of their friends to AIDS, in what must have felt like the blink of an eye, perpetual grief may be the only rational, truly human response. In this novella, "Grief", which seems to me as essential and indelible a book as Isherwood's "A Single Man", Holleran walks and walks around Washington D.C., as he once walked round his parent's Florida town, observing the life around him and wondering if and when and how he should re-enter its flow. (As you order "Grief", you really should order too a used copy of his magnificent but sadly out-of-print essay collection, "Ground Zero".) Holleran's cursed with the gift for observation, which may mean that he'll always be walking alone down those streets, but we're lucky that he keeps sending back these reports, much of which, it's worth noting, is quite funny. I've been reading this book aloud and emailing passages to friends for two days now. His voice fills my head and calms my addled heart. I wish he still wrote his monthly column because I think he might just be our Thoreau.

As we age, as we move beyond the terror of AIDS, what lies in store for us afterwards? For many of us, the 1980s brought a reign of horror in which friends died with the days, and the liberating lovemaking that defined us began to attack us. The immediacy of the pain of the now filled our hearts; but as the unnamed narrator claims in Andrew Holleran's new novel, Grief, it was for a time the disease du jour, and now we, as a nation, have moved on.

Grief is a treatise of a man's journey through the loss of his mother, and how it's reflection in his own life both illuminates and despairs him to actions that surprise. Narrator comes to DC to teach, to theorically support himself, to live in the house of a stranger, arranged by a close, also dying, friend. Narrator deals with the swirling events of his life by delving into the private letters of Mary Todd Lincoln, who spent her life grieving the loss of her husband, and living in a country that simply didn't want her. The narrator makes his way through Washington; through bath houses, cruisy parks, fountains, and embassies, and also picks his way through this very unique feeling of grief.

Holleran's writing is simple, elegant, and stunning. There were several passages that I reread just for the pleasure of the sounds of the words. His descriptions are exacting; anyone in Washington DC could very easily follow Narrator's path, and see the same, exactly described sights, especially his jaunt to work down Massachusetts Avenue to American University.

Holleran never attempts to answer the questions that he posits, but he swimmingly explores them through rich conversations between characters and the rich symbolism found in row houses and objects d'art. Mary Lincoln may have never found her solace, does Narrator? Or does Narrator find the balance? That is for Reader to decide.

Grief is a quick read, but its effect is one that stays, and lingers, indefinitely.

While reading "Grief" I did something I've never done before with a book. After I read the last page on the first reading, I immediately turned again to page one and read the book through a second time. Holleran confirms in this one hundred and fifty page novella something that I've suspected for a long time. The suspicion was that in America today we are not allowed to grieve, at least not for extended periods of time; not nearly as much time as some of us might need.

Andrew Holleran, as many of us gay Americans who have lived through the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, has experienced more than his share of grief. When one of the characters in the book is asked how many friends he has lost, he says from three to six hundred. In large cities like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, that is not an exaggeration.

With the birth of gay liberation in 1969, a decade of sexual freedom for gays began that was unheard of before that. And why not, we had all the time in the world we thought before settling down with one partner. We were in our late teens or early twenties and as all youth have thought since the beginning of time, we felt we were indestructible, that we would never die. We were too young yet to learn to integrate the other parts of our lives with our sexual ones and as Holleran puts it: "...we spent our lives having the sort of sex that was accompanied by an unwritten guarantee that was completely dissociated from any form of emotional or social attachment whatsoever."

So, when AIDS appeared in the early `80's, it was happening before anyone knew what it was or who it was effecting or how it was spreading. In one of his classroom settings, the narrator in "Grief" compares AIDS to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln: "They were both to a degree accidents"..."From the point of view of the person harmed-the person who did not desire this fate." The victims of the epidemic are not just the ones who acquired and died from the disease, but are also those who live with the HIV virus or those who struggle to keep from acquiring it as well as our family members. We are often stymied with fear, unable to form viable relationships. We need a time of grief to get past that.

Holleran uses the grief of Mary Todd Lincoln brilliantly in this book to show someone who refused to give up her grief over the death of all but one of her children as well as the assassination of her beloved husband because in her mind to do so would mean to lose them. As a result, her one remaining son had her committed because he thought that he was doing what was best for her. In America today, our friends and other family members think that they are doing us a favor when they tell us to get on with our lives; to pretend that loved one never existed. What we need though is to have a time of grieving, to hold on to them a while longer, to work past any guilt we might have concerning them to remember why we loved them. Our future relationships will be enhanced by it.

Unlike other writers, Holleran knows he doesn't have to hit the reader over the head to get his ideas across: it's much more effective to crawl under our skin. GRIEF is a deceptively simple book--short, thematically focused, with only a minimal plotline--but the cumulative effect is powerful and devastating. As the nameless narrator wanders the streets of Washington, DC (with nary a reference to politics, as if we are in a mythic landscape, where the resident of the White House doesn't matter), observes the antics of his quirky landlord, and becomes enthralled by the tragic story of Mary Todd Lincoln, his own feelings are kept at arm's length. He occasionally delves into his immediate grief--the loss of his mother--but under the surface lie the deaths of dozens of others, friends and lovers lost to AIDS. This is the story of an unwitting survivor who, at some level, questions both how he survived and why. The grief is unending, because he believes that's the way to keep the dead forever with him. In so doing, of course, he freezes his own life. Holleran's prose reads like poetry, his characters emerging like modern archetypes, and as a result, the feeling of grief is palpable. It takes only a few hours to read the book, but the emotions it conjures up are lasting. I believe this is Holleran's finest work since the classic "Dancer from the Dance." A must-read for anyone who's ever lost--which is all of us.

Unless you have recently suffered a personal loss, it is difficult to pick up a book entitled "Grief." Holleran's novella is, however, required reading for any gay man over fifty. As Larry Kramer says on a back-cover blurb, "Grief" completes the cycle begun with "Dancer from the Dance." It beautifully describes where a generation of gay men who danced and lusted in the 1970s have arrived. For the younger homosexual, and for anyone else, straight or gay, male or female, "Grief" offers something else: exquisite writing. Holleran makes even mundane details interesting because of the care taken with his writing. It is a style easy to read and so hard to write. Mark Twain said: "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." In "Grief," Holleran creates a brilliant storm.