Pausing briefly throughout his spherical of just about motorised erotic delights in New York, the hero of Andrew Holleran’s first novel, Dancer from the Dance, proclaims the glory of homosexual liberation and foresees its doom. “We’re utterly free,” he says, “and that’s the horror.” This was in 1978; three years later, Aids curtailed the disco-fuelled revels and Holleran started to put in writing essays a couple of metropolis that had become an ashen graveyard. His subsequent novels, printed at intervals of a decade or extra, have tracked an extended withdrawal – from New York to Florida, the place Holleran moved to take care of his aged mother and father, and from hedonism to the metaphysical gloom or “morose delectation” that he absorbed from his Jesuit training.
Now, in The Kingdom of Sand, a anonymous narrator, deputising for the near-octogenarian Holleran, soberly contemplates what Christian eschatology calls the final issues. The arid nook of Florida by which he's beached could be a parody of Fireplace Island, the sandbar off Lengthy Island the place the characters of Dancer from the Dance alternately solar themselves on the shore and couple, triple or quadruple within the dunes. The sand that spreads by means of the drought-stricken setting of the brand new novel is a morbid symptom, warning that the planet, trashed by our “manufacturing mania”, could quickly be uninhabitable. Intercourse for the narrator consists of occasional blowjobs administered to unattractive strangers, in classes that quantity to what the Catholic church defines as corporeal acts of mercy. In any other case, he spends his days viewing porn, which he likens to the depressing video games of solitaire performed by his dying father. However the coital bouts on the display screen solely worsen his boredom, because the performers take so lengthy to succeed in orgasm that “watching them is like ready for a bus”.
Overlook about Florida as the house of Disney World, Tupperware and Donald Trump: right here, the state is loss of life’s antechamber. The town of Gainesville is a focus camp for retirees, all hospitals, nursing houses and crematoria; a cardiac unit is just like the Nasa area station at Cape Kennedy, with sufferers as would-be astronauts making ready to be ejected from the Earth. Neither is loss of life the top, since posthumous indignities comply with. Our bodies certain for the mortuary launch a remaining spurt of gasoline, which medical doctors name “the Morgue Fart”. Fluids from a corpse left undiscovered seep right into a concrete flooring and an ozone machine has to work time beyond regulation to sanitise the room’s foul air.
Melancholy is relieved by Holleran’s grim wit and by flashes of sanctity from above. The characters in Tony Kushner’s “homosexual fantasia” Angels in America are visited by seraphs and Holleran often spots celestial castaways. A handyman has the face of a Giotto angel, although his “huge ass” is disappointingly all the way down to earth, whereas a bearded youth exterior a pizza joint who seems like Jesus seems to be peddling medicine slightly than promising salvation. St Benedict provides the novel with its haunting epigraph and when the narrator notices the sagging, raccoon-infested roof of his home, he recollects St Jerome’s verdict on the empty temples of the heathens, taken over by owls and bats after God arrange store elsewhere. St Francis isn't name-checked, however the messy housekeeping described by Holleran entails a Franciscan respect for lowlier types of life. Tree frogs that hop indoors are gently ushered out and earthworms obtain homage as a result of their labours make “agriculture, and due to this fact human civilisation” doable. Errant, entangled vegetation is allowed to take over the backyard, just because it needs to be there; even most cancers, like Virginia creeper or Spanish moss, reveals off “the identical phenomenon: progress”.
When you cease anticipating one thing to occur, Holleran’s writing is as calmly compelling because the repetitive duties that occupy a monastic day. The narrator picks blueberries one after the other, not in bunches, at a tempo that “returns you to the Center Ages”. Sentences that progressively unfurl and loop into circles share this soothing deceleration. Holleran’s mannequin is the punctilious method of the late Henry James, whose touch upon the stroke that killed him is quoted right here: as he collapsed, James solemnly welcomed “the distinguished factor”. On this distinguished however terminally melancholy novel Holleran appears to be anticipating his personal finish.
In Fireplace Island: Love, Loss and Liberation in an American Paradise the literary critic Jack Parlett revisits the heyday of the resort the place the sybarites in Dancer from the Dance cavorted. Though Parlett’s ebook pines for that carnal Eden, the historical past he reels by means of is dystopian, a reminder that “homosexual life is meant to be a bit unhappy”. There are brawls in a lesbian bar frequented by Patricia Highsmith, James Baldwin complains in regards to the futility of addictive intercourse, whereas for the poet Frank O’Hara, who was killed by a runaway dune buggy on the seashore, the surf is “dolorous”, battering the land to wind-blown granules. Holleran as soon as described Fireplace Island as a blessed appendix to the mainland, the place puritanical America could possibly be forgotten for so long as your trip lasted. At the moment, because the ocean rises and hurricanes rage, this fragile, erosive barrier is being nibbled away – annihilated, as we'll all ultimately be, by the sifting kingdom of sand.
The Kingdom of Sand by Andrew Holleran is printed by Jonathan Cape (£14.99). To help the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Supply fees could apply.
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