A Novelist of Moods
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            The friends seem to have met through frequenting a nearby cruising spot, although the one explicit reference to sex in the book explains why the narrator finds pornography a more satisfying outlet. They spend many evenings watching old movies, described with a relish that recalls film historian Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet, which revealed the hidden gay meanings in many Hollywood classics. Earl introduces the narrator to both Hollywood and operatic greats as he sinks slowly into oblivion, cared for in his final years by a vaguely sinister “handyman” who remains too opaque to be a satisfactory villain.

     Rather than telling a story, Holleran’s great ability is to evoke emotion and empathy. As Christopher Bram wrote of his first, much acclaimed novel Dancer from the Dance: “[It is] a scrapbook of mood pieces that shouldn’t work as a novel, but it does, the moods are so perfectly rendered that they are enough.” The Kingdom of Sand has less variation in mood than Dancer, and at times it is unnecessarily repetitive, but Bram’s comment remains apposite. Holleran has not lost his ability to convey deep emotions and conjure vivid landscapes, but he paints on a small canvas, and the book flags as the same themes recur in slightly shifting form. In some ways he could be compared to a pointillist author writing at a time that demands greater ambition, novels that transcend the purely domestic minutiae of slowly decaying bodies.

            Like Edmund White in his most recent book, A Previous Life, Holleran has turned to the novel to explore the dusk of aging. Unlike White, he is not ostensibly his own protagonist, although there are clearly autobiographical elements in the book. But while White delights in snobbery, satire, and self-mockery, Holleran remains consistently depressed, with his evocation of the sort of lonely old age that was assumed to doom homosexuals fifty or more years ago, when our very existence was assumed to be a crime, an illness, a sin, or at best a type of deviance.

            The assumption that aging and loneliness are somehow inextricably linked is central to this book, but that link is surely less connected with one’s sexuality than The Kingdom of Sand suggests. I’m sure there are many isolated and scared homosexuals in Middle America, but Holleran’s narrator seems remarkably unaware of the extent to which social and legal attitudes have changed, despite those frequent visits to Washington. Not to have someone waiting for you at home, a theme that recurs through the book, is hardly a particular homosexual experience. Social isolation of the old is a common complaint in all wealthy societies, and I would be dismayed if a young reader assumed that their sexuality condemned them to the isolation that Holleran depicts.

            The frontispiece of the book quotes Saint Benedict as telling us to “Keep death daily before your eyes,” an admonition that Holleran seems to have followed. Benedict lived to the age of 67, a remarkable age for the sixth century, but his death was seemingly far less lonely than the one Holleran foresees. The Kingdom of Sand is haunted by images of old people dying alone, undiscovered for several days.

            It is a mark of how bleak this book is that the most optimistic note comes on the last page, when he writes: “One must be grateful for what one has.” I would argue that it is precisely the refusal to accept this position that has fueled most progressive movements, including what we now call the LGBT one. There were moments in reading The Kingdom of Sand that I wanted to give Andrew Holleran a good shake and tell him to leave northern Florida for somewhere less haunted by the melancholy of his past.