The Review of Contemporary Fiction
In September the Light Changes: The Stories of Andrew Holleran by Andrew HolleranDavid Bergman
Andrew Holleran. In September the Light Changes: The Stories of Andrew Holleran. Hyperion, 1999. 320 pp. $23.95.
In the early seventies a cohort of gay men emerged who devoted themselves to two things: the pursuit of the arts and of sex, preferring those occasions when the two merged, or as a character in this collection puts it: “I want someone who can quote Rilke, and eat my ass till his face falls off.” Finding such a person has never been easy—even in the seventies, even in New York—and thus many of these gay men became disappointed and disillusioned long before AIDS whittled their number down to a handful. It has been the work of Andrew Holleran—and to a lesser extent Edmund White and Felice Picano, Holleran’s friends and colleagues—to chronicle this cohort (can we even call it a sub-subculture?) of which they are survivors. As time has gone on, their fiction has taken on an increasingly epic cast because it seems less and less about individuals than about their entire culture. Although speaking of short stories as epic is oxymoronic, no other term does justice to these tales of a civilization cut to the bone. Little happens in them, and yet the little that does exposes fundamental shifts in prespective, which, of course, alter everything except, as the title story ruefully acknowledges, the human heart. These stories are Chekhovian, not merely in their psychological subtlety, lyric intensity, and haunting mixture of comedy and tragedy that make impossible distinguishing one from the other, but because, as in The Cherry Orchard, the tiniest incidents resonate with millennial implications as one manner of life gives way to another. Holleran reveals a sensibility so fine and an intelligence so subtle, that no matter how much attention this collection receives, it will, by definition, be overlooked. [David Bergman]