The narrator resists change, including a move to assisted living or a gay mecca: “Fort Lauderdale, for gay men, was what Israel is for the Jews,” he writes. There’s a resigned, existential peace to all his angst about intruding in and retreating from other people’s ongoing dramas, from his sister and her family, who invite him up North annually for Christmas although he’d rather stay home, to other gay men he meets in their parallel quests for anonymous sex at an ancient video arcade or isolated boat ramp. (Photo courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux) The Kingdom of Sand, to be released June 7, is the first novel in 13 years from Andrew Holleran, author of Dancer From the Dance. Instead, as he faithfully observes Christmas decorations on a nighttime walk by himself - such as a giant Santa balloon lying flat on his back - or the lives of his neighbors, seen through distant lit windows, one senses the narrator’s constant need to connect with other human beings, to touch their hearts, minds, and bodies. Though he clearly disdains what many Floridians have done to their lush natural environment through mindless development, Holleran’s narrator never talks down to a kitschy or blandly commercial blue-collar or bourgeois aesthetic. Holleran is often grouped with Edmund White among queer writers, and though he shares White’s deep respect for his characters, no matter how unsophisticated they are, he exercises none of the florid density one finds in White’s fiction.Īn example: “Roads are to Florida what syringes are to veins,” says the narrator in The Kingdom of Sand, “the swiftest means to introduce a foreign element into the body in this case, humanoids.” Holleran took a pen name in the ’70s to protect his parents from his sexual honesty, but he has stuck with it, and it still suits the defensive emotions of Kingdom of Sand’s narrator, along with his uncompromising forthrightness. Leaving the narrator unnamed in The Kingdom of Sand increases the subjective nature of the prose - you see him almost entirely as he sees himself, and not through others’ eyes - and it also obscures the line between memoir and fiction, since Holleran’s life so clearly matches that of his storyteller. The protagonist of Dancer From the Dance has fled New York City for rural Florida, just as Holleran did, and his subsequent novels have continued the personal recollections of a gay man, like himself, who resides there. It’s an elegant counterweight to Larry Kramer’s Faggots, a farcical and moralistic epic novel that exposed the emptiness of that world - in downtown nightclubs and the beach houses of Fire Island - with far less grace. Dancer From the Dance gave literary weight to gay men’s desires and ennui as they forged a path in a world with few guideposts. Holleran (the pen name of Eric Garber, now 79 years old) immediately stood out as a formidable writing talent: his exquisite prose managed to simultaneously express passion and disillusion with equal precision. Author Andrew Holleran, the pen name of Eric Garber, is a legendary literary voice of the post-Stonewall generation. That earlier work rhapsodically recalled the sexual explorations and impossible romances of gay men who got caught up in the pre-AIDS bacchanalia that was Manhattan in the ’70s. The novel is the first in 13 years from Holleran, whose 1978 seminal classic Dancer From the Dance turned him into one of the major figures of queer literature in the post-Stonewall generation. That sums up the conflicting mix of alienation, despair, and vibrant engagement evoked by the unnamed narrator at the center of The Kingdom of Sand - an unattached gay man in his 60s who is living in his deceased parents’ home in a rural lakefront town between Gainesville and Jacksonville and gradually losing the aging friends and connections that sustain him in his loneliness. In his new novel, Andrew Holleran writes, in a scene set at a North Florida Thanksgiving dinner attended by older gay men, “There is a delicate undercurrent beneath get-togethers among singles on holidays that mingles the comfort of having a friend to relieve your isolation with the realization that the two of you have nobody else.”