The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Beauty of Men by Andrew HolleranDavid Bergman
Andrew Holleran. The Beauty of Men. Morrow, 1996. 272 pp. $24.00.
A sign of the extent to which Andrew Holleran’s first novel, Dancer from the Dance, has achieved the status of one of the great works of recent American literature is the number of critics from Bruce Bawer to David Leavitt to Dennis Cooper who have gone out of their way to denounce it as dangerous. As the Yeats-inspired title suggests, Dancer from the Dance is about whether an eroticized aesthetics of life is the means to personal fulfillment or self-erasure. Holleran’s awareness of both the corrosiveness and the allure of such an eroticized aesthetic is what has made the book so compelling and controversial. His counter to the eroticized aesthetics of the New York gay scene has been the homely domesticity of small-town Florida. However, in The Beauty of Men, his long-awaited third novel, Holleran recognizes that the homely domesticity of Florida is no more enlarging or less destructive than the gay eroticized aesthetic he had left in New York. A devotion to beauty or a devotion to family ends up destroying the devotee, yet distancing oneself from either beauty or loved ones results in an equally empty egoism. Caught between his mother, paralyzed in a nursing home, and his obsession with Becker, a gay father, Mr. Lark—the protagonist of The Beauty of Men—prepares himself for what the narrator of Nights in Aruba, Holleran’s second novel, unconvincingly asserts that he must do: live his own life. At the end of the novel, Mr. Lark is taking his first step to discover what he wants, to engage as well as be engaged.
The Beauty of Men begins in a cold, hard, rather documentary manner that reflects Lark’s attempt to distance himself from the AIDS pandemic that has killed so many of his friends, the paralysis that has whittled his mother’s life down to a nub, and the suburban isolation that reduces community to Peeping-Tommery. But the limitations of this style are far too clear, and slowly the prose achieves the sinuosity that is the hallmark of Holleran’s voice, a style that marks both his emotional rapport with and intellectual distance from his subjects. The result is that The Beauty of Men is his most moving and disturbing gay novel, replacing Dancer from the Dance’s exploration of the convulsions of youth with the reconstitution of middle age. [David Bergman]