Grief (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. An understated, eloquent novel by Holleran (Dancer from the Dance) captures the pain of a generation of gay men who have survived the AIDS epidemic and reached middle age yearning for fidelity, tenderness and intimacy. The unnamed, silver-haired narrator has just relocated from Florida, where he cared for his recently deceased mother for the last 12 years, to Washington, D.C., to "start life over" and teach a college seminar on literature and AIDS. He rents a room in a townhouse near Dupont Circle, his solitude deepened by his awareness that he and his gay, celibate landlord, a "homosexual emeritus," form only a semblance of a household. The narrator spends his days exploring the streets of the capital and his nights engrossed in the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln, who held onto her grief and guilt at her husband's death much like the narrator hordes his guilt for never having come out of the closet to his mother—and for having survived the 1980s and '90s. Holleran makes his coiled reticence speak volumes on attachment, aging, sex and love in small scenes as compelling as they are heartbreaking. Visiting with his friend Frank, whose willful pragmatism throws the narrator's mourning in sharp relief, prove especially revealing. Frank manages to have a steady boyfriend, while for the narrator, his landlord and most of their friends, love and partnership seem impossibly intimate. Until its terse, piercing conclusion, Holleran's elegiac narrative possesses its power in the unsaid. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

"The beautiful life was brief."

These words, from Constantine Cavafy's poem "In the Evening," could serve as an epigraph for the body of work produced over the last 28 years by Andrew Holleran. Holleran's 1978 debut novel, Dancer from the Dance , was hailed for its groundbreaking and unapologetic account of gay life in the post-Stonewall era. Its themes and swooping prose owed much to Proust and F. Scott Fitzgerald, especially The Great Gatsby. When one rereads it now, nearly three decades later, the novel seems eerily prescient of the devastating effect the AIDS epidemic had upon the gay community (and continues to have throughout the world).

But in its wake, a generation of gay men came to build their own glittering clubs and mansions and memories upon a landscape that for many years resembled a war zone. Most of Holleran's later writings -- two novels, a story collection, the searing essays in Ground Zero, one of the best dispatches from the epidemic's height -- have dealt with these survivors.

Grief, his haunting and unexpectedly exhilarating new novel, takes his longtime themes -- loss, desire, the deep joy and solace humans derive from their homes and surroundings -- and distills them into a heady, bittersweet aperitif. And like the best aperitifs, this slender novel whets one's appetite for an entire meal of the author's other work.

The unnamed narrator has arrived in Washington, D.C., to teach a university seminar on Literature and AIDS. In addition to the systemic sense of loss shared by many gay men of his generation, he feels a nearly insuperable burden of guilt over his mother's death, compounded because he never came out to her. He rents a room near Dupont Circle, in a townhouse he shares with his landlord, another middle-aged gay man. The two pass each other on the stairs and sometimes in the kitchen. Occasionally, these fleeting encounters extend into conversations but nothing more intimate. In his free time, the narrator walks around the city or reads a book he has found in his bedroom: "Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters."

That's pretty much it for plot.

Yet, as with the fiction of James Salter -- the writer Holleran's prose most evokes -- this slender volume conjures up a rich and deeply seductive, satisfying world, one that welcomes readers gay, straight, single, coupled or otherwise.

Despite its title and minor-key ending, Grief is not a depressing book. "Beauty does not lose its allure under the spell of grief," Holleran writes in one of his essays, and Grief is suffused with beauty -- not just the beauty of men but the beauty of the city whose streets the narrator wanders as though in a waking dream. I have never read a novel that so powerfully and movingly evokes D.C. -- its spirit, its ideal essence. "People never say anything nice about Washington," a character laments, but Grief provides a potent corrective. Like Cavafy leading one through the alleys and restaurants and history of Alexandria, Egypt, Holleran's narrator is a guide to the labyrinth of ambition, death, art and desire that lies within L'Enfant'scarefully executed grid of streets and parks: "The National Archives had the same cold light as the Tomb of Napoleon," he writes, "and the National Gallery made you feel, when you entered the echoing rotunda, and walked between its dark marble pillars, you were entering the palace of Pluto."

"They will make wonderful ruins," Sen. Thomas P. Gore, grandfather of Gore Vidal, once remarked to a visitor enthusing over Washington's architectural marvels. Until they do, they make a wonderful setting for Holleran's acute and often droll observations of the city.

The parallels between Grief's emotionally immured protagonist and Mary Lincoln, ravaged and ultimately destroyed by grief over her husband's death, are evident but not overplayed. And the narrator's decision as to how to live the remainder of his life seems as etched in stone as the words he reads on the city's monuments. Still, in the end, Holleran's moving novel is mostly about human resilience and hope; our enduring need to love, despite our losses. The beautiful life is brief: all the more reason to embrace it.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 150 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion (May 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401302505
• ISBN-13: 978-1401302504
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #634,336 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #7 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( H ) > Holleran, Andrew
  #89 in	Books > Gay & Lesbian > Parenting & Families

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A near perfect prose work., June 7, 2006

By	I. Sondel "I. Sondel - lover of the arts" (Tallahassee, FL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Treatise On Grief, June 8, 2006

By	H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Story of Our Lives, July 31, 2006

By	Tom S. "filmfan3" (New York City) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.