The Kingdom of Sand
by Andrew Holleran
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022

 The publication of the novel Dancer from the Dance in 1978 came as a revelation to gay readers long hungry for a book both reflective of their lives and superbly written. Michael Cunningham dubbed it, in 2018, “the first Big Gay Literary Sensation.” The writer: a 35-year-old Harvard grad and first-time novelist, Eric Garber, who chose “Andrew Holleran” as a pseudonym to keep his family unaware of his sexuality. Ironic that.

Midcentury gay men who looked for literary mirrors did so largely in vain. True classics—Giovanni’s Room, A Single Man, The City and the Pillar—were rare and restricted by the mores of the times; others were depressingly bleak (Last Exit to Brooklyn, City of Night), pure kitsch (The Lord Won’t Mind), melodrama (The Front Runner), or a wee bit late-to-the-party (Maurice). And as for Mary Renault, bless her for trying.

But Dancer was something else. Intelligent, witty, sensual, with lush, hypnotic prose, it captured the post-Stonewall explosion of pride, lust, drug-induced, rampant sexual license, and self-indulgence as embodied by (some of) the gay men of New York in the hothouse enclaves of Greenwich Village and Fire Island. The book is equally seductive and cautionary: excesses of sex and drugs can result in ecstasy, but can break hearts and bodies as well.

Holleran brought a poet’s touch to this world, where physical perfection was (is?) king:

There were people so blessed with beauty ... they did not know what to do with it.... Everyone was a god, and no one grew old in a single night. No, it took years for that to happen ... For what does one do with Beauty—that oddest, most traditional of careers? There were boys  ... bank tellers, shoe salesmen, clerks, who had been given faces and forms so extraordinary that they constituted a vocation of their own. They rushed out each night to simply stand in rooms about the city, exhibiting themselves to view much as the priest on Holy Saturday throws open the door of the Tabernacle to expose the chalice within.

He was also a pitiless critic: “Have you ever noticed,” says one character, “that gay men secrete everything in each other’s presence but tears? They come on each other, they piss on each other, or shit, but never tears! The only sign of tenderness they never secrete in each other’s presence.”

Holleran also serves up generous dollops of camp, most often in the creation of Sutherland, a doomed, tragicomic queen bee, usually heavily costumed and sexually desperate: Here he is,

hanging out his window in an orange wig, frilly peasant blouse, and gas-blue beads, screaming in Italian to the people passing on the street to come up and suck his twat. “I’ve been sitting at home all afternoon hoping to receive the stigmata,” he said, closing the autobiography of Saint Theresa he was reading when he began his impersonation of a Neapolitan whore, “but all I got were invitations to brunch this weekend. No more quiches, please! One could die of quiches!”

It’s impossible to read the book unaware of what would arrive with such dark result in the next decade, when AIDS began its relentless march, decimating the community and instilling gay writers with both fury and purpose. Larry Kramer, once reviled for the novel Faggots, his impassioned jeremiad against sexual promiscuity, published the same year as Dancer, was suddenly a Cassandra (but often grudgingly appreciated). He abandoned fiction for a time, co-founded the political protest group ACT-UP—and channeled his creativity energy into the theater: The Normal Heart has proven to be one of the enduring AIDS-related works of the era; it’s lost little of its potency over the years. While Holleran could not have foreseen a plague, he sensed that such decadence could not be sustained.  As one character writes to another,

We were lunatics I’m sorry to say.  Our lovers weren’t real. Wasn’t that the strangest thing of all? The way we loved them? … Were we cowards? Shy girls waiting to be serenaded? Or did we all suspect that half the beauty and the shimmer of that life was in our own hypnotic hearts and not out there?  … You know, we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality, I think. In that order. Anyway, that’s why I left—the madness of it all offended me.

In the four decades after Dancer, Holleran published four novels, a volume of short stories, and a book of essays. The novels together form a quartet of sustained melancholy. Largely vanished is the gorgeous, luxuriant poetry of Dancer, as is much of the joy. The nameless first-person narrators of three of the novels, and Lark, the center of the third-person-narrated The Beauty of Men, share so many of the details of Holleran’s own life that fiction and memoir blend: A childhood in the Caribbean recalled during a sexually prolific adulthood in New York City (Nights in Aruba); a move to a small town (Christian and conservative) near Gainesville, Florida, to care for his ailing parents (The Beauty of Men); a sojourn in Washington, DC, (Grief) and a return to the small town, presumably to live out his last years—much of the time ruminating on loneliness, aging, the  overwhelming legacy of AIDS, desultory sexual contacts, and death (The Kingdom of Sand). It is in many ways an unrelentingly dispiriting quartet.

Kingdom’s narrator is in his 60s, still occupying his late parents’ home for reasons he can’t quite understand, and there he’s surrounded by furniture, clothes, figurines and art objects hoarded over the years, none of which he can bring himself to discard. His sex life is one of endless frustration: the video store where anonymous hook-ups are possible make him feel old, yet he returns there with dreary regularity. His only predictable release is orally serving a partnered neighbor without reciprocation who stares passively at the TV during the act.

Holidays are more avoidance than celebration. Halloween is spent hiding in a walk-in closet with a flashlight and a book; on Thanksgiving he cooks the traditional meal and eats alone; and he agrees to visit his sister out of town for Christmas only because he hasn’t the nerve to decline.

A substantial portion of Kingdom is devoted to Earl, the narrator’s “only friend,” a gay retired community college teacher, 20 years his senior, who leaves a near-reclusive life with three dogs, an impressive collection of classic movie DVDs and opera recordings, and an unused bathroom that has become a “cockroach cemetery” of insect corpses never discarded.

Earl himself as a major eccentric is far less interesting than the narrator’s obsessive interest in him, which lasts for two decades—not exactly love or even affection, but certainly one of jealous nature when Earl’s handyman vies for the older man’s attention. The narrator himself is perplexed at Earl’s hold on him, but records this epiphany:

I thought of death as the motel we would go into when we stopped on our drive out west to see if the room would be acceptable: that is, something the older person would have to do. That your father will die before you is a given—part of the scheme of things. And after my own died, Earl was the buffer between me and death ... a person I was observing for the slightest signs of decline.

Observing decline and death seem to be the book’s raison d’etre. (“Keep death daily before your eyes” is its St. Benedict epigraph). There are lengthy litanies of dead neighbors and friends and the diseases or accidents that killed them. Holleran has lost none of his acute, penetrating vision. On viewing his mother’s corpse:

Death had already started to alter the color of her skin from flesh to marble. The cessation of her heart had taken away from her circulating blood, the élan vital, that animates human beings; she was shutting down the way a tree dies limb by limb till there’s not a green leaf on it, the way she’d told me to fall asleep when I was a child by relaxing my extremities one by one.

A great deal of Thanatos, but little regard for Eros, although it’s always top of mind:

The idea of touching an actual person was becoming increasingly unimaginable, for not only was I wasting enormous amounts of time watching porn—unless no time that is devoted to erotic matters is wasted—but watching sex on film (where nothing could go wrong) had made me reluctant to have sex in reality where so much can…. I’d found myself the day before standing at the stove … when I began pushing my groin at the oven door; and when I went over to the kitchen sink I began to hump it.  I need to check into the hospital … and ask the nurse to hook me up to an IV—an IV filled with semen.

My first reading of The Kingdom of Sand left me frustrated and sad. Frustrated because I had hoped that after 16 years Holleran had somehow transcended the world of his three previous novels and ceased to rehearse his favorite obsessions. I had also hoped that perhaps he would be the one to bring us the Great AIDS Novel that has yet to arrive. His age (79) and the long silence between Grief and Kingdom do not augur well for an imminent burst of creativity.

But rereading—this time looking at the trees, not the forest—I had to own up to my sensitivity to the author’s decline and mortality. (I’m close enough on his temporal heels to count the hairs on the back of his neck.) I began to realize that he in some ways my Earl, a way of monitoring my own decline. And it was not always comfortable. (OK, never comfortable.) From a second read, I once again fell in love with his forthright prose, unfailingly honest but frequently touching and tender—and frequently razor-sharp.

He ends the book with a chapter boasting an excellent title, “Two Loves Have I At Walgreens,” that could easily serve as a standalone short story. It’s a typical Christmas for the narrator—marked by loneliness, depression, two unrequited crushes (dubbed Edgar Allan Poe and the Boy with Bette Davis eyes, both employees of Walgreens)—but here he allows a measure of ... what? pleasure? sentimental warmth? to seep into his life, inspired by his neighbors’ clichéd Christmas traditions and his expectations (however unlikely) of a Walgreen’s tryst.

“One must be grateful for what one has,” he tells us. An atypical banality from Holleran, but here it comes as a welcome ray of sun piercing the clouds.

Michael Adams is a writer and editor living in New York City. He holds a PhD from Northwestern University in Performance Studies.