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It’s rare to find fiction that takes this kind of dying of the light as its subject and doesn’t make its heroes feel either pathetic or polished with a gleam of false dignity. He inverts the opening of “Pride and Prejudice,” creating a sharp joke of it: “It is a fact seldom observed that after a certain age a single man is a creature no one has any place for.” “When Life is behind you, you can eat whatever you want because you’re on your way out,” the narrator notes. Someone has to pick you up after your colonoscopy!” one lunch-friend implores. “The Kingdom of Sand” isn’t persistently mordant, but its humor is inevitably of the black-comic sort. “It seemed to me that had buried himself alive like the man in the story by Edgar Allan Poe,” he writes, oblivious to the shovel in his own hands. The narrator has lost both his parents and left most of his close friendships behind in New York he clings to Earl out of a fear of intimacy he only half-acknowledges. Rather, the suspense is over how - and whether - the narrator is going to confront his and Earl’s mortality. The tension in the two men’s “shared loneliness together” has little to do with plot - it’s clear from the start that everybody is headed in one direction, underground.
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The titles of their classic movie selections grow darkly suggestive: “Quo Vadis,” “Psycho,” “I Want to Live!” The increasing presence of a handyman raises suspicions. Earl is quiet and diffident, except to express surprisingly right-wing politics. One of Earl’s bathrooms is closed because it’s constantly attracting cockroaches. And Holleran slowly gives the relationship an increasingly otherworldly, creepy vibe. It was as if Nature did not exist only Art.”Ī world filled with art but no nature is, well, unnatural. “As long as I went there, I never saw Earl once open the vertical blinds that covered the sliding glass doors that led outside. Earl’s home is an airless, tidily ordered sanctum of records and movies fussily cataloged on index cards. But if their friendship is cozy, Holleran also makes it slightly funereal. The narrator simply swings by Earl’s to make small talk and watch movies. They first met at the boat ramp when the narrator was in his early 40s, and though there was no romantic or erotic spark, they’re content with their casual, platonic relationship. That feeling is underscored by the narrator’s friendship with Earl, a man about 20 years his senior. Yet he’s realizing that his pursuits don’t deliver the validation he craves, that there’s little joy in chasing “the same quintet of egg-shaped men in baggy T-shirts.” While he’s still healthy, he staves off the inevitable by trying too hard - proving his virility by consuming porn and cruising a local boat ramp and video store, hoping for connection. The narrator has experienced plenty of loss: Living in north central Florida, he catalogs the deaths of his parents, his friends and perhaps his nearing own. In such a collection, “Sand” would feel like a summation of Holleran’s work, circling tighter than ever around matters of desire and mortality. Regardless, a Library of America volume would be the least he deserves. Blame the long waits between books, or a mainstream literary culture that’s often treated LGBTQ fiction as a niche enterprise. His essays and other works of fiction are similarly rooted in the lives of gay men, but his Jamesian powers of observation haven’t translated into major prizes or name recognition. His 2006 novel, “ Grief,” is a melancholy masterpiece about how so many of those men were cut down by AIDS. Holleran’s debut, 1978’s “ Dancer From the Dance,” is among the great post-Stonewall novels, capturing the fading youth of a coterie of gay New York men. Which is to say that it continues the project Holleran began four decades ago: elegant, contemplative works obsessed with matters of intimacy and loss. “This story is about the things we accumulate during a lifetime but cannot bear to part with before we die,” its unnamed narrator explains. Andrew Holleran’s fifth novel, “ The Kingdom of Sand,” announces its theme early.