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Gay Fiction
Condition: Very Good Slight damage to dust jacket, ink and pencil inscriptions on inside front cover, slight staining to part of page edge, but overall very good condition. Plot / Content: Background / Biography: Reviews: "Mr Holleran writes with a joy and understanding of the language that I have seldom seen in novels by anyone, anywhere." Merle Miller, author of Plain Speaking (from the jacket) Years ago, when it first appeared, I read and was seduced by Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance. It was not Malone, the Dancer, who attracted me, but Sutherland, the queen (an often misleading and inadequate word) with the heart and wit of gold. Equally alluring was the world which Sutherland presided over and the anonymous narrator glided through - New York City and Fire Island, hot summer days and long nights of music, drugs, parties and desire. The images were as tantalising - and irrelevant - as those of a vivid dream. Now Nights in Aruba has appeared, the languid autobiography of a gay man who grew up on that Caribbean island, spent his army service in Heidelberg and now lives in Lower Manhattan. His parents have settled in Jasper, Florida; his telephone calls are regular and unwilling, his visits infrequent. There are many echoes of Dancer - late-night cruising in streets and parks, preoccupation with men's beauty (typified by Mediterraneans and moustaches), brief acquaintances euphemistically described and mourned as 'lovers'. And again there is the poetic language, Holleran's trademark - clear, precise words which flow into each other like the brush-strokes of an impressionist painting. The narrator in the first book was obsessed with beauty and pleasure; these concerns remain in Nights but are overshadowed by the distance between himself and his parents, especially his mother. It has not been a cloying relationship, of the type beloved by psychiatrists in explaining away male homosexuality, but love and admiration have turned to unease as she has grown old and he has become aware he is gay. She worries about him, does not understand why he tells her nothing of his life in far-off New York nor why his friends are never invited to Jasper. He feels guilty for his secrecy and resentful of the few demands made on his time. It is a pattern familiar not only to other characters in the novel but to all gay men whose mothers could never understand their son's lifestyle. The generation gap is compounded by a gap of sexuality and each action, each lie, each refusal to open up causes pain both to ourselves and the parents we still love. So we sympathise, but... As the narrator approaches middle-age (we presume - time is fluid in Holleran's books), still without a lover yet compulsively seeking one, fatally attracted to good looks yet unable to accept the personalities of those who possess them, his failure with his parents begins to resemble his failure, except on the most superficial levels, with other men. Despite his circumstances and age he is, we realise, immature, and our sympathy turns to exasperation. The dream has lost some of its appeal - it has become real. It is the curse of second novels never to be as well received as their predecessors. Nights in Aruba has some flaws but is by no meals a failure. I look forward to Holleran's next book with both anticipation and anxiety. Martin Foreman, January 1983 Clicking on advertiser links on this site may allow these companies to gather and use information about your visit to this and other websites to provide you with advertisements about goods and services presumed to be of interest to you. |
Quote from this book " Then there was only the wind in the darkness, which seemed full of sound now that we could see nothing; palms thrashing against each other, leaves rustling on the hedge of olive trees. When I entered the house I saw my father holding my mother's chair out for her. We said grace. The wind howled in the louvers. Inez sighed because she had missed the six o'clock bus to the village. 'Lord preserve us.' We ate beneath a painting of a woman knitting in an apple orchard outside a whitewashed hut while her children played at her feet. 'That's how I want my family,' my father always said ... And sometimes when I lifted my head from the book I was reading beneath the date palm, and heard the slap of Inez's sandals as she crossed the patio and my mother talking to the woman who lived next door, I felt his dream was the sweetest one on earth." Secondhand booksellers |
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