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The Beauty of Men
A universal tale of loneliness, aging, and the desires of the human heart, Holleran's long-awaited third novel tells the brilliant, passionate story of a man ashamed to be mourning the loss of his own youth as so many around him die young. Lark is obsessed with the beauty of youth and his own mortality, his hairline and the loss of so many of his friends to AIDS, and, above all, with a stunningly virile man who haunts his days and his dreams.
288 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1996
About the author
Andrew Holleran
31 books291 followersBorn in 1943. Andrew Holleran is the pseudonym of Eric Garber, a novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is a prominent novelist of post-Stonewall gay literature. He was a member of The Violet Quill, a gay writer's group that met briefly from 1980-81.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews
January 6, 2015
Selected by my boyfriend after an argument where he accused me of never reading the books he recommends to me, I was disappointed that the entire reading experience made me feel like a passive witness, recognizing the undeniable literary brilliance, but only feeling it at a distant, cold remove. This was particularly disappointing considering this is one of his very favorite books. Rather than empathizing with the overwhelming despondency over the way the AIDs crisis, geographical isolation, personal circumstances, and unreciprocated desire has left the main character's life in a state of utter ruin, I was surprised to find myself more wrapped up in–and ultimately moved by–the gut-wrenching sadness hovering over his mother's debilitating health condition(s). I still find it a bit mystifying that I generally seem more capable of relating to the queer literary output of the pre-Stonewall era than the literature that blossomed under the advancement of the Gay Rights Movement, and while acknowledging its great accomplishment, literary skill and observational acuity, The Beauty of Men ultimately reaffirmed this situation yet again.
[Capsule review from the post My Year of Reading Queerly over at my blog, Queer Modernisms.]
[Capsule review from the post My Year of Reading Queerly over at my blog, Queer Modernisms.]
January 22, 2008
This is a very controlled novel about isolation. Published in 1997, it is the story of a gay man who has been almost entirely cut off by the gay community. Because of the AIDS crisis, he finds virtually no gay men his age to befriend. Younger men have no desire to know him, for a variety of reasons: He is not young, he is not powerful and he is not wealthy. Above all, the specter of AIDS causes other gay men to be wary of him. He is a pariah among gay men due to his date of birth.
This novel could have been maudlin or preachy. Instead, it is intense without being shocking and angry without being rageful.
The prose is graceful.
I would recommend this to any serious student of literature.
This novel could have been maudlin or preachy. Instead, it is intense without being shocking and angry without being rageful.
The prose is graceful.
I would recommend this to any serious student of literature.
July 29, 2015
More than a book about the aftermath of the AIDS crisis this is really a book about aging in a youth obsessed gay culture. I had made the decision to read all of Holleran’s work after reading Dancer from the Dance and Grief, but after reading this book and Nights in Aruba, I am rethinking.
Ultimately concern about growing old, especially to this mid-life crisis level presented in the book, just seems so vain. I’ve heard this story before from others, how they are now invisible when they go into a bar after they reach a certain age. These same people will acknowledge that they treated older men the same way when they were younger but are now painting themselves as the victim when it happens to them, as if a 20 year old was looking to hook up with someone who’s 60 on a Saturday night.
I don’t really understand this and I don’t have much patience for it. When I went out when I was younger I never went for the best looking guy in the place, I went for someone uniquely attractive to me and let my attitude and enthusiasm carry me through. My personality has only gotten better with age, easier to control, so I don’t feel I’ve lost anything.
I found the sections of the book about Becker, Lark’s ideal and one-night fling almost impossible to read, I’m reading them looking through my fingers because I’m cringing so much. Even Lark’s rationale for loving Becker is flawed, as this passage about late-night trysting place the boat ramp reveals:
“But that’s why I love Becker. He doesn’t go to the boat ramp! He went that one night just to see what it was like. And he’s never been back since. He said he liked to talk to people first. He’s the exception to the boat ramp. An escape from the boat ramp.”
So Lark goes to the boat ramp to meet someone who doesn’t go to the boat ramp. Do you know how many gay men do this with the bars to this day? It’s maddening and self-destructive and if you can’t get yourself off this cycle I don’t really have time for sympathy.
The book is well written, as is all of Holleran’s work, and full of great observations:
“The functional disappear at the baths almost immediately: They are having sex. The dysfunctional remain in view, sitting in the TV lounge or on a bench in the locker room, like Lark—a penitent in the street before Santiago de Compostela, asking only the pity of the passerby.”
I just wish the characters were a little more aware of themselves. I did like Eddie, the 70 year-old man who cruises during the day like others play golf, it keeps him busy. He goes home to his dog at night and Lark sees it as terrible, every gay man’s worst nightmare, getting old alone. I see Lark’s life as the nightmare, caught up in the past and unable to live in reality. Give me a dog over this any day.
Ultimately concern about growing old, especially to this mid-life crisis level presented in the book, just seems so vain. I’ve heard this story before from others, how they are now invisible when they go into a bar after they reach a certain age. These same people will acknowledge that they treated older men the same way when they were younger but are now painting themselves as the victim when it happens to them, as if a 20 year old was looking to hook up with someone who’s 60 on a Saturday night.
I don’t really understand this and I don’t have much patience for it. When I went out when I was younger I never went for the best looking guy in the place, I went for someone uniquely attractive to me and let my attitude and enthusiasm carry me through. My personality has only gotten better with age, easier to control, so I don’t feel I’ve lost anything.
I found the sections of the book about Becker, Lark’s ideal and one-night fling almost impossible to read, I’m reading them looking through my fingers because I’m cringing so much. Even Lark’s rationale for loving Becker is flawed, as this passage about late-night trysting place the boat ramp reveals:
“But that’s why I love Becker. He doesn’t go to the boat ramp! He went that one night just to see what it was like. And he’s never been back since. He said he liked to talk to people first. He’s the exception to the boat ramp. An escape from the boat ramp.”
So Lark goes to the boat ramp to meet someone who doesn’t go to the boat ramp. Do you know how many gay men do this with the bars to this day? It’s maddening and self-destructive and if you can’t get yourself off this cycle I don’t really have time for sympathy.
The book is well written, as is all of Holleran’s work, and full of great observations:
“The functional disappear at the baths almost immediately: They are having sex. The dysfunctional remain in view, sitting in the TV lounge or on a bench in the locker room, like Lark—a penitent in the street before Santiago de Compostela, asking only the pity of the passerby.”
I just wish the characters were a little more aware of themselves. I did like Eddie, the 70 year-old man who cruises during the day like others play golf, it keeps him busy. He goes home to his dog at night and Lark sees it as terrible, every gay man’s worst nightmare, getting old alone. I see Lark’s life as the nightmare, caught up in the past and unable to live in reality. Give me a dog over this any day.
November 19, 2013
My feelings about this book are a little complicated. Very little happens - the narrator pines after a one-night stand while caring for his quadriplegic, elderly mother. Things don't come to a head until the book is almost over. Holleran is a real charmer with description, and I love how expansive and meditative he is. The main character is a self-admitted hypocrite when it comes to judging others for their age and beauty. He suffers a loneliness that we watch him inflict on those around him. The last four or five chapters, which follow a confrontation with the unrequited love, are the best in the book and stand among Holleran's best work. The book is purposefully meandering, though. I love Holleran's writing, but I did feel that the first two-thirds of the book were unnecessarily repetitive. It's tough - repetitive it's what this sort of story calls for. Anyway, this is a very powerful book about aging and loneliness. Holleran's Grief is this book's unofficial sequel. Though that book is more compact, I much prefer the expansiveness and intimacy of this one.
April 30, 2008
Perhaps one of the most haunting books I've ever read, with sentences that still resonate for me. It's a depressing read, if you're a gay man of a certain age, but it is Holleran's langorous writing that lifts this book into an art form.
January 1, 2021
If Anita Brookner wrote about gay sex.
November 9, 2017
Dolor, depresión, soledad, silencio, obsesión... sentimientos y sensaciones oscuras pero brillantemente narradas y poéticamente descritas en esta novela de Holleran sobre el devastador paisaje que enfrenta Lark, un hombre gay mayor que ha visto su mundo derrumbarse, sus amigos morir de una indescriptible plaga, su belleza juvenil desaparecida; a quien solo le quedan el cuidado de la madre cuadraplégica en un hogar para ancianos, el ir y venir a lugares de cruising en los que se sabe en la desventaja de quien ya no es atractivo, las conversaciones escasas y tristes con los pocos sobrevivientes de su antigua vida, su paralizante obsesión por un encuentro fugaz de años atrás.
La queda reflexión de Lark sobre estos tópicos que marcan su devenir diario es culta y romántica, obsesiva y repetitiva como un moscardón sobrevolando alguna flor en una tarde calurosa y sin brisa; sin embargo, no carece de vuelo poético y en ciertos pasajes, de la universalidad sobre el temor a la muerte y el olvido, sobre la culpa y el secreto, sobre la ilusión de la vida que pudo ser.
La queda reflexión de Lark sobre estos tópicos que marcan su devenir diario es culta y romántica, obsesiva y repetitiva como un moscardón sobrevolando alguna flor en una tarde calurosa y sin brisa; sin embargo, no carece de vuelo poético y en ciertos pasajes, de la universalidad sobre el temor a la muerte y el olvido, sobre la culpa y el secreto, sobre la ilusión de la vida que pudo ser.
September 24, 2020
I first read this book right after it came out in the mid 90's. I was in my twenties then and just recently discovered Andrew Holleran. Clinging to every word he'd written, I devoured his latest book about an aging gay man who is caring for his paraplegic mother while also obsessing over a man he picked up at the boat docks one night. I couldn't relate to it. It was just a slice of gay life I had yet to experience myself. I was happy to be reading a new book from an author I loved.
Now in my 40s, I reread it and came away with a whole new relatable experience. I've experienced the loneliness and obsession of the main character, Lark. The scenes of him visiting his mother in the senior center were also relatable, as my dad spent the last three years of his life in one as well. I've lost friends to AIDS. I've reminisced over the way things were "back then." I've mourned my youth and a parent. I've felt invisible and unattractive.
The book holds up. It's a classic in gay literature that I'm sure I'll read again in another twenty years. True to life, there isn't much hope in the end, but we don't always need hope to enjoy a book. Sometimes a book should just give us a hard slap in the face and remind us of the better times we've forgotten or wasted.
Now in my 40s, I reread it and came away with a whole new relatable experience. I've experienced the loneliness and obsession of the main character, Lark. The scenes of him visiting his mother in the senior center were also relatable, as my dad spent the last three years of his life in one as well. I've lost friends to AIDS. I've reminisced over the way things were "back then." I've mourned my youth and a parent. I've felt invisible and unattractive.
The book holds up. It's a classic in gay literature that I'm sure I'll read again in another twenty years. True to life, there isn't much hope in the end, but we don't always need hope to enjoy a book. Sometimes a book should just give us a hard slap in the face and remind us of the better times we've forgotten or wasted.
December 24, 2019
Andrew Holleran strikes again with yet another story that strikes at the heart of gay life in his book being gay and aging, "The Beauty of Men."
Following the late-in-life story of Lark, a man reeling from the deaths of all his friends by AIDS the decade prior and living alone in North Florida to care for his dying mother, "The Beauty of Men" is a tale of the loneliness that seems to accompany gay life in the 90s, when all hope, friendship, and companionship has died and left you behind. Unafraid to confront the issues of aging, changing bodies, and the challenges of being older in a gay community obsessed with youth, Lark embodies the loneliness we as gay men so greatly fear as we age.
Sometimes overdrawn with too much nostalgia and a bit much "bitter old queen" talk, much of this book still remains essential: a reminder to care for our elders and that loneliness happens in our community but is something we should, young and old, fight together against.
Following the late-in-life story of Lark, a man reeling from the deaths of all his friends by AIDS the decade prior and living alone in North Florida to care for his dying mother, "The Beauty of Men" is a tale of the loneliness that seems to accompany gay life in the 90s, when all hope, friendship, and companionship has died and left you behind. Unafraid to confront the issues of aging, changing bodies, and the challenges of being older in a gay community obsessed with youth, Lark embodies the loneliness we as gay men so greatly fear as we age.
Sometimes overdrawn with too much nostalgia and a bit much "bitter old queen" talk, much of this book still remains essential: a reminder to care for our elders and that loneliness happens in our community but is something we should, young and old, fight together against.
April 3, 2016
Very eloquent description of life of a gay man in the mid-1980's. Lark has moved to Florida to care for his mother for the past twelve years after she fell and broke her neck. Over the same time period he has watched several of his New York friends die from AIDS. He has a sexual encounter with Becker, a man a little over a decade younger, and becomes almost obsessed with the man. While dealing with his mother's care and his loss of friends, he also tries to deal with growing older in the gay community. Mildly dated but overall still very relevant and the relationship with his mother is very touching. A good solid novel.
July 31, 2013
Although I find Holleran's writing to be beautiful especially when setting the scenes endlessly switching from flashback to flashback, I couldn't get into the content with enough conviction. Lark is our main character torn between leaving NYC for "twelve days" and now, twelve years later, Lark, 47 yrs old, is still here in Gainsville, Florida taking care of his quadriplegic mother and reminiscing on the earlier days of youth and beauty and men... He becomes a stalker, obsessing over a sexual encounter he once had 10 years prior in the mensroom near the local boat dock that he continues to prowl. And now his perspective on Life is jaded, lost, depressing, death.
Age and AIDS...grim
Age and AIDS...grim
January 30, 2015
I am glad this book exists, because it captures the impact of a horrible disease on a particular group of people at a specific moment in time. But man I did not love reading this book. The narrator is so sad, so defeated, in ways that elicit frustration more than sympathy.
February 21, 2021
Anything Holleran writes is pretty much sacred to me. An achingly beautiful novel with prose that practically sings.
July 10, 2017
Not necessarily universal, but an exploration of what can happen to Gay men who are aging and alone. It is colored somewhat by the effects of the AIDS epidemic on survivors in the 90's. Still for those who still have time, it is a warning to prepare yourself for your elder years.
The comparison of Lark's and his mother's situation is apt.
9 of 10 stars
The comparison of Lark's and his mother's situation is apt.
9 of 10 stars
March 25, 2024
Essentially the anti-LESS by Andrew Sean Greer in its pursuit of exploring themes of aging, isolation, longing, obsession, and grief in an older, gay protagonist. Much darker & bleaker with some stunning reflections on humanity. Ultimately, I didn’t love it as much as DANCER FROM THE DANCE, but I look forward to picking up Holleran’s other books!
Read
September 21, 2024DNF 49%
February 14, 2024
3.4 | tint your windows, ladies.
March 11, 2021
Last year I said I wouldn't torture myself by reading classic gay literature set in an around the aftermath of the AIDS crisis in the USA. And yet here I am again. It's quite interesting that the writing itself is mostly emotionless. and that's pretty much how I felt after finishing. Half the time I wanted to give Lark a big hug and the other half of the time I wanted to shake him and say "wake up to yourself".
October 19, 2019
What a miserable book. Extremely reptitive with no pathos, catharsis or movement of plot. At 270+ pages it’s too long and the titular character is rather unlikable with little redeeming qualities (even molesting an unconscious man). A painful read even if enlightening on the ramifications of the AIDS crisis.
November 25, 2012
In his third novel Andrew Holleran explores the subjects of aging and loss. The protagonist is Lark, a middle aged gay man who is faced with the cold truth of lost youth. Lark's life is filled with aimless midnight cruising and lonely moments of despair in his empty apartment. He has lost his professional drive a long time ago and most of his closest friends have fallen victim to the AIDS epidemic. Lark's whole existence is completely saturated with the dull despair of someone who grieves after lost opportunities and the beauty he sees around him and is now unable to reach.
"The Beauty of Men" is a lament, but one that doesn't feel over the top or too self conscious. It's an honest and beautiful character study filled with keen observations about a modern life as it is gradually nearing its latter half. Holleran's language is lucid, yet lyrical and melancholic.
It's extremely disturbing how obsessively Lark grieves because he cannot satisfy the sexual longing he feels towards men he is now invisible to. Even more disturbing is how desperately he longs after the feeling of desire itself. I thought the numbing of primal urges is the main good thing about growing old and supposedly wise. Well, however it actually goes, Holleran's writing is alarmingly plausible.
In the middle of all the bitterness about unattained beauty and longing, aging and eventual death are most effectively present in scenes that takes place in a nursing home Lark visits daily to take care of his paralyzed mother. The interaction between mother and son is powerful in its hopelessness and sad beauty. And the atmosphere of a place where life is quietly dimming is strongly presented and I think crystallizes the essence of this magnificent piece of modern literature.
"The Beauty of Men" is a lament, but one that doesn't feel over the top or too self conscious. It's an honest and beautiful character study filled with keen observations about a modern life as it is gradually nearing its latter half. Holleran's language is lucid, yet lyrical and melancholic.
It's extremely disturbing how obsessively Lark grieves because he cannot satisfy the sexual longing he feels towards men he is now invisible to. Even more disturbing is how desperately he longs after the feeling of desire itself. I thought the numbing of primal urges is the main good thing about growing old and supposedly wise. Well, however it actually goes, Holleran's writing is alarmingly plausible.
In the middle of all the bitterness about unattained beauty and longing, aging and eventual death are most effectively present in scenes that takes place in a nursing home Lark visits daily to take care of his paralyzed mother. The interaction between mother and son is powerful in its hopelessness and sad beauty. And the atmosphere of a place where life is quietly dimming is strongly presented and I think crystallizes the essence of this magnificent piece of modern literature.
April 26, 2012
"The Beauty of Men” is a poignant story of loss and loneliness told from the perspective of Lark, 47 years old, residing in Florida to take care of his invalid mother. Lark was young in the heyday of the 70’s when beautiful men enjoyed a carefree hedonism yet unaffected by the AIDS epidemic. It is a sad story filled with pathos and angst, as Lark recounts his friends from his glory days (all of whom have died), while he is aging alone without love, yet continually seeking it in the places he feels reduced to haunting for brief encounters – a secluded boat ramp as an example. There is a sense of melancholy pervasive from beginning to end in this story, but Holleran writes so elegantly, capturing the character’s sense of diminishment so precisely, you appreciate the writer rather than the mood evoked. Lark is a healthy middle-aged man. He is experiencing the natural aging process yet cannot seem to reconcile himself to it. Instead of acceptance and appreciation (he’s alive, he made it through the plague - his friend’s did not), he mourns the loss of youth and beauty - searching it out like the Holy Grail - an acolyte at the altar of younger men rather than the priest. As I read the story of Lark, I kept remembering Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state…And look upon myself and curse my fate.” “The Beauty of Men” is eloquent and poetic although I found it somewhat heartbreaking at times. It is not necessarily a “must” read, but it certainly a worthwhile one.
March 6, 2015
I love how many truths there are in this book related to aging, sexuality and being alone. There's an unforgettable line in it - "When you need a mother, anyone's mother will do." A good friend of mine is a gay man serving a long prison sentence, and he has lamented about aging and living a life devoid of healthy romantic fulfillment. I gave him a copy of this book and it was great conversation fodder. This is a powerful, honest book.
July 7, 2008
Maybe the most depressing and one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.
August 9, 2011
Painfully true. Awfully real. Wonderfully incisive.
August 30, 2023
As a writer, some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read; as a gay man, some of the most eviscerating. This the third in Holleran's suite of mostly-autobiographical novels that chronicle his aging out of the NYC gay scene of the 1970s-80s and settling into a mournful, solitary life in small-town Florida. He's in his late 40s, caring for his disabled mother, hearing of his New York friends dying of AIDS, cruising compulsively and pining after an uninterested younger man, obsessed with his own faded beauty. He self-absorbed and despondent, blaming himself for never coming out to his parents and for "the final failure to adhere, to connect, to form a union." He always yearned for partnership and domesticity, but rejected his only opportunities for it, blinded by his own fantasies. The whole novel is saturated in the sense of a life that has many years left but is already over, that failed by midpoint to accomplish its stated objective. Lark, the narrator, returns constantly to his regret at wasting the window he had to find love, even as he doubts that gay men are really even capable of it: "Life is what happens to you when you are planning to do something else." He thinks: "Nature cries with one voice, 'Do it now.' Ignore this at your peril. The greatest sin: to live life as if it will never end."
A lot of reviews suggest this book is "about" AIDS, but I think it's actually about the necessity of connection between human beings and the failure to achieve it. The loneliness of being an inward, fantasy-driven person who shrinks from connection—something Holleran thinks in some ways is characteristic of gay men and exacerbated by gay culture's perfectionism. The distance from his friends and the weight of their deaths certainly figures into Holleran's despondency, but his real obsession is with his own inability to get out of his head. When he asks how he's supposed to go on living when his friends are dead and he has failed at life, another friend replies that the only answer is: "Don't wallow." But Holleran is a wallower, it's his entire soul. "I've been wallowing for years," he thinks. "I'm wallowing in death." He knows he could make his life better by connecting with people: "The most important space in the universe is not that from here to Mars or Jupiter, but from you to another human being; it is that space we are always trying to conquer, that space that must be bridged." He could come out to his mother, who is paralyzed and longs for nothing more to be truly close to him; he could try to socialize with other gay men rather than just cruise at sketchy local hideouts. He desperately wants to get off the sidelines and live, but ultimately he is just unable to do so. Holleran exquisitely renders the psychological obstacles we often have to the most obvious things that would make us feel better, and the great comfort of retreating into our despair.
If it wasn't so beautifully written and full of wisdom, I would almost say this book is too black and nihilistic to bear. But I think it's the best of Holleran's first three novels, a triumph of form and mood. Holleran always tries to balance an enthralled, ecstatic appreciation of beauty and joy with a grim recognition of their fragility, and this one pushes the needle so far toward the latter that it almost breaks. Nevertheless, he realizes that even the grimmest of lives offers consolations, glimpses of transcendence. Though Lark finds his closeness with his mother pathetic and his psychological dependence on caring for her depressing, but he also recognizes in it the kind of meaningful human connection that has eluded him in the rest of his life. "He was, at last, what he'd always wanted to be: a parent. Life grants us what we desire in ways we never imagined." Cuddling with a man in a bathhouse, even though he knows they will never see one another again, becomes a majestic rumination on touch: "It's all the thoughts I cannot express, and all the things I cannot say, and all the feelings I cannot act upon, and all the sadness, the failure, all the grim reality wiped out in a single electrical spark—my body's warmth against his body's warmth, raising each a few degrees." Even in the most anguished of nights, there is still the miracle of the world: "Then it starts to rain again, and he thinks that even in the midst of sorrow, justified or not justified, self-indulgent or unsought, there is the sound of the rain on the roof—the beauty and wonder of life."
A lot of reviews suggest this book is "about" AIDS, but I think it's actually about the necessity of connection between human beings and the failure to achieve it. The loneliness of being an inward, fantasy-driven person who shrinks from connection—something Holleran thinks in some ways is characteristic of gay men and exacerbated by gay culture's perfectionism. The distance from his friends and the weight of their deaths certainly figures into Holleran's despondency, but his real obsession is with his own inability to get out of his head. When he asks how he's supposed to go on living when his friends are dead and he has failed at life, another friend replies that the only answer is: "Don't wallow." But Holleran is a wallower, it's his entire soul. "I've been wallowing for years," he thinks. "I'm wallowing in death." He knows he could make his life better by connecting with people: "The most important space in the universe is not that from here to Mars or Jupiter, but from you to another human being; it is that space we are always trying to conquer, that space that must be bridged." He could come out to his mother, who is paralyzed and longs for nothing more to be truly close to him; he could try to socialize with other gay men rather than just cruise at sketchy local hideouts. He desperately wants to get off the sidelines and live, but ultimately he is just unable to do so. Holleran exquisitely renders the psychological obstacles we often have to the most obvious things that would make us feel better, and the great comfort of retreating into our despair.
If it wasn't so beautifully written and full of wisdom, I would almost say this book is too black and nihilistic to bear. But I think it's the best of Holleran's first three novels, a triumph of form and mood. Holleran always tries to balance an enthralled, ecstatic appreciation of beauty and joy with a grim recognition of their fragility, and this one pushes the needle so far toward the latter that it almost breaks. Nevertheless, he realizes that even the grimmest of lives offers consolations, glimpses of transcendence. Though Lark finds his closeness with his mother pathetic and his psychological dependence on caring for her depressing, but he also recognizes in it the kind of meaningful human connection that has eluded him in the rest of his life. "He was, at last, what he'd always wanted to be: a parent. Life grants us what we desire in ways we never imagined." Cuddling with a man in a bathhouse, even though he knows they will never see one another again, becomes a majestic rumination on touch: "It's all the thoughts I cannot express, and all the things I cannot say, and all the feelings I cannot act upon, and all the sadness, the failure, all the grim reality wiped out in a single electrical spark—my body's warmth against his body's warmth, raising each a few degrees." Even in the most anguished of nights, there is still the miracle of the world: "Then it starts to rain again, and he thinks that even in the midst of sorrow, justified or not justified, self-indulgent or unsought, there is the sound of the rain on the roof—the beauty and wonder of life."
April 29, 2022
A slow, lonely, circular book about all the ways the body betrays us.
The body betrays us when it becomes broken and paralyzed. Or, the body becomes sick. Or, the body ages, rendering us unworthy vessels, casting us off our pedestals.
Worst of all, it wants and desires. It needs. And through all this needing, it sets us apart from society, dooms us, leaves us to terrible scenarios where we don’t get the things we want, or we are considered diseased and insane and deviant and unneeded. We are perceived as that which should be corrected or punished or destroyed.
The main betrayal Lark registers is aging. He is very distressed by the way his body keeps striding forward in time, changing without his approval.
We could chalk this up to vanity, but I think in this case it is more complex. Yes, Lark hates aging for what it represents on the surface: mortality, exile from desirability, a shifting of one’s place in community, a vacuum appearing where you once totaled your worth.
Lark’s body has betrayed him by aging because aging is a sign of survival. Lark left New York when it was a graveyard. He lives in the lush swamps of Florida and they’ve never seemed more dry and lifeless, beautiful baroque descriptions aside. He survives. His body keeps going. Day after day, the same sad routines, the same foot in front of the other. He drives the same routes, haunts the same boat ramp, the same bars, the same nursing home where he visits his mother, trapped in a body she cannot use the way she wants. Lark muses on the similar circumstances of his own imprisonment. How dare this body of his keep him here, suspended. How dare he survive and have to bear all that guilt.
Of course he transposes so much of that panic to Becker - young, healthy, seemingly untouched by the things about gay culture that have Lark so jaded - but Becker also lacks a body, in many ways, because he was known in the flesh once and now lives only in fantasy, so he can become the vessel for Lark to pour everything into, and he cannot betray Lark in that space - only the memories of Becker’s actual being are the things capable of hurting Lark, which is, perhaps, why he stays away without ever letting go. Lark circles the memory of Becker like a drain. He watches the lit windows of Becker’s house at night, thinks about Becker’s body touching other bodies. He lets himself be consumed by this obsession because, among many other things, it distracts him from the sad reality of being a survivor.
This book leaves you drained. There’s so much life and vivacious energy in Holleran’s earlier work and I can see how people might be turned off by the sense of utter defeat that infects this one, the feeling you’re trapped in this work with Lark, two prisoners serving time together. I think that is the point, really. There is beautiful language, beautiful sentiments, and the loneliness is terrible to experience but it is gorgeously rendered. To me, that is more than worth the price of a rather difficult reading experience.
The body betrays us when it becomes broken and paralyzed. Or, the body becomes sick. Or, the body ages, rendering us unworthy vessels, casting us off our pedestals.
Worst of all, it wants and desires. It needs. And through all this needing, it sets us apart from society, dooms us, leaves us to terrible scenarios where we don’t get the things we want, or we are considered diseased and insane and deviant and unneeded. We are perceived as that which should be corrected or punished or destroyed.
The main betrayal Lark registers is aging. He is very distressed by the way his body keeps striding forward in time, changing without his approval.
We could chalk this up to vanity, but I think in this case it is more complex. Yes, Lark hates aging for what it represents on the surface: mortality, exile from desirability, a shifting of one’s place in community, a vacuum appearing where you once totaled your worth.
Lark’s body has betrayed him by aging because aging is a sign of survival. Lark left New York when it was a graveyard. He lives in the lush swamps of Florida and they’ve never seemed more dry and lifeless, beautiful baroque descriptions aside. He survives. His body keeps going. Day after day, the same sad routines, the same foot in front of the other. He drives the same routes, haunts the same boat ramp, the same bars, the same nursing home where he visits his mother, trapped in a body she cannot use the way she wants. Lark muses on the similar circumstances of his own imprisonment. How dare this body of his keep him here, suspended. How dare he survive and have to bear all that guilt.
Of course he transposes so much of that panic to Becker - young, healthy, seemingly untouched by the things about gay culture that have Lark so jaded - but Becker also lacks a body, in many ways, because he was known in the flesh once and now lives only in fantasy, so he can become the vessel for Lark to pour everything into, and he cannot betray Lark in that space - only the memories of Becker’s actual being are the things capable of hurting Lark, which is, perhaps, why he stays away without ever letting go. Lark circles the memory of Becker like a drain. He watches the lit windows of Becker’s house at night, thinks about Becker’s body touching other bodies. He lets himself be consumed by this obsession because, among many other things, it distracts him from the sad reality of being a survivor.
This book leaves you drained. There’s so much life and vivacious energy in Holleran’s earlier work and I can see how people might be turned off by the sense of utter defeat that infects this one, the feeling you’re trapped in this work with Lark, two prisoners serving time together. I think that is the point, really. There is beautiful language, beautiful sentiments, and the loneliness is terrible to experience but it is gorgeously rendered. To me, that is more than worth the price of a rather difficult reading experience.
June 19, 2022
Holleran's third novel, The Beauty of Men is the story of an aging gay male who leaves NYC in the middle of the HIV epidemic to care for his mother in Florida. The main character, Lark literally has his life put on hold for twelve years caring for his mother who broke her neck in a household accident. It is a fascinating and candid look at how aging and the epidemic impacted the lives of gay men of a certain age and how Lark deals with the larger questions about life in general. Like all of Holleran's novels it is written in a straightforward manner in a simple but readable style that again privileges the larger issues in Lark's life. While I enjoyed the book, because so many of the characters were people I have known, I found myself curious about some of the minor characters, especially Lark's older friend, Sutcliffe and his life.
"The year 1983 marked a deep change in his world. Lark is still waiting for someone to step forward and say, "This has all been a mistake. Let's go back to the second scene on page eight and start all over from there." But no one has." 7
"That's all AIDS is...Very accelerated aging, illness, and death. Eddie went from forty nine to ninety-two in less than a year..It has been a year; incredible as that seems, he's sure of that, though time has sort of flattened out the past decade...That's characteristic of middle age, he heard. Life turns into a vast flat ocean, like the sea at the equator, on which the two points of departure and arrival-Birth and Death-are, for a while, invisible. He no longer makes any effort to measure Time...He dates the beginning of this epoch of timelessness from his mother's fall and Eddie's death; but from then on, it is all so seamless, odourless, featureless continuum, like the drab landscape of pine and oak around here-a sort of limbo." 8
"He remembers beginning to feel more like a ghost himself each time he returned, walking the streets with the realization that his own friends, his youth, his visibility were gone-that you become a ghost before you die sometimes, not after." 10
"We're like two brokers in the twenties, he thought, who lost everything in the stock market crash. The business in which they had invested everything had collapsed." 31
"That's the reason. I'm needy. He could smell it. He could see it. And there's nothing more frightening than someone who's needy-someone who's drowning and may pull you under-which meant he refrained from calling the thirty year old." 83
"Life is sad," Ernie says. "Because you never know what you've got until you lose it. You know the saying, Life is lived forward, but understood backward." 121
"Tennessee Williams said, "Each time I pick someone up on the street, I leave a piece of my heart in the gutter." 223
"You want to dwell on the imperfections. The Jesuits call it morose delectation." 250
"In its place is an indescribable emptiness, a lightness that is very heavy, a long, golden autumn in north Florida he has no idea what to with." 272
"The year 1983 marked a deep change in his world. Lark is still waiting for someone to step forward and say, "This has all been a mistake. Let's go back to the second scene on page eight and start all over from there." But no one has." 7
"That's all AIDS is...Very accelerated aging, illness, and death. Eddie went from forty nine to ninety-two in less than a year..It has been a year; incredible as that seems, he's sure of that, though time has sort of flattened out the past decade...That's characteristic of middle age, he heard. Life turns into a vast flat ocean, like the sea at the equator, on which the two points of departure and arrival-Birth and Death-are, for a while, invisible. He no longer makes any effort to measure Time...He dates the beginning of this epoch of timelessness from his mother's fall and Eddie's death; but from then on, it is all so seamless, odourless, featureless continuum, like the drab landscape of pine and oak around here-a sort of limbo." 8
"He remembers beginning to feel more like a ghost himself each time he returned, walking the streets with the realization that his own friends, his youth, his visibility were gone-that you become a ghost before you die sometimes, not after." 10
"We're like two brokers in the twenties, he thought, who lost everything in the stock market crash. The business in which they had invested everything had collapsed." 31
"That's the reason. I'm needy. He could smell it. He could see it. And there's nothing more frightening than someone who's needy-someone who's drowning and may pull you under-which meant he refrained from calling the thirty year old." 83
"Life is sad," Ernie says. "Because you never know what you've got until you lose it. You know the saying, Life is lived forward, but understood backward." 121
"Tennessee Williams said, "Each time I pick someone up on the street, I leave a piece of my heart in the gutter." 223
"You want to dwell on the imperfections. The Jesuits call it morose delectation." 250
"In its place is an indescribable emptiness, a lightness that is very heavy, a long, golden autumn in north Florida he has no idea what to with." 272
Read
March 1, 2024Reading the back cover synopsis, I wasn't expecting myself to become so engrossed in a gay man's narrative about homosexuality and aging, since I am neither gay, a man, or old, but the writing was so good, I felt as If I were for a moment. I never realized how much a young, heterosexual girl would have in common with Lark, a 47 year old gay man, but when I think about it it makes sense since we both grow up with the shared experiences of finding attraction to men, and of other men looking at us for our youth and bodies... and of course, the prevalent themes of coming to terms with aging, infatuation and thinking someone else will make everything better, difficulties of forming relationships, craving intimacy, and death of loved ones, are all universal regardless of gender, age, or sexual orientation. In fact, the book was so depressing (even for me!) I had to take a break from reading it one night, afraid its influence would put me on a downer.
There are a lot of good quotes and passages in the story, about consumerism, the increasing atomization of society, too much to copy and write here. The book touches on all the things we try to avoid thinking about, don't want to admit, or never put into words so clearly.
Seeing Lark's obsession with Becker, we might all be able to relate to it to a certain degree of infatuation, but in the 3rd person, his obsession is largely, conspicuously, delusional an pitiful. Throughout the novel lark puts a lot of focus onto the physical attributes of himself and everyone around him, and although people do the same in real life, how much of that weight was from his own projections on how he values everyone else versus how much it actually matters? And though it does, if you start thinking too much into that way, it is, as David Foster Wallace put it: "Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you..."
There was one line I really liked in the book, when Lark drives to a bar and sits in his car outside the entrance and he realizes he's not going to find what he's looking for, because what he's looking for is to walk into the bar and meet someone new that he's known for 6 years, and since that's not going to happen he turns around and leaves. Ah, have I not hoped for the same thing before? The instantaneous intimacy, the FasTrack to a relationship, I don't have 6 years, I want it now! (And that's only if you even still like the person after 6 years).
In the end, it's not a happy ending, which I appreciate but one that seemed in due course for his trajectory.
May 2, 2024
In 1995, our narrator, Lark, is a gay man in his late 40s – a former NYC cosmopolitan – he's escaped the ravages of AIDS after moving down to Florida to care for his suddenly paralyzed mother. The temporary move turns into a 12-year stay, during which all of his friends die.
Lark is left to contemplate the pointlessness of his own survival and the horrors of aging. As the months caring for his mother in Florida stretch into years, he searches for love – and courts rejection – in the public restroom of a boat ramp off a quiet exit on a Florida freeway.
Stuffed inside the pages of this book, about halfway through, I found a black and hot-pink bookmark for The Gay Emporium on South Beach. Books * Magazines * Lube * Leather * Cards * Condoms * Etc. “Open Every Day” the bookmark announced. A time capsule from a forgotten age. As is the book.
When it was written, very few people could know that life-extending antiretrovirals were just around the corner. That the awful parade of death and misery would finally slow. That political breakthroughs would soon follow the medical ones and that the glacier of public opinion would finally begin shifting.
There are points in this book where the tone of general melancholia risks tipping over into hopeless nihilism. “Being a homosexual is like trying to climb Niagara Falls,” Lark narrates at one point. “Eventually you have to admit: The water is going the other way. If you would only go in its direction, Life would take you right along downstream. Heterosexuality is like having a room ready for you at a hotel: The staff is expecting you – everyone knows his role. The homosexual shows up and has no reservation; he ends up outside; quite literally in the bushes.”
Clearly, we're well outside “It Gets Better” territory. But maybe that's where we should be. Holleran forces us to think of what's being lost in the triumphalist narrative of unending political advancement. What painful wounds, what hollow aches still remain at the core of so many of our lives and have simply been papered over under the banner of progress.
Lark is left to contemplate the pointlessness of his own survival and the horrors of aging. As the months caring for his mother in Florida stretch into years, he searches for love – and courts rejection – in the public restroom of a boat ramp off a quiet exit on a Florida freeway.
Stuffed inside the pages of this book, about halfway through, I found a black and hot-pink bookmark for The Gay Emporium on South Beach. Books * Magazines * Lube * Leather * Cards * Condoms * Etc. “Open Every Day” the bookmark announced. A time capsule from a forgotten age. As is the book.
When it was written, very few people could know that life-extending antiretrovirals were just around the corner. That the awful parade of death and misery would finally slow. That political breakthroughs would soon follow the medical ones and that the glacier of public opinion would finally begin shifting.
There are points in this book where the tone of general melancholia risks tipping over into hopeless nihilism. “Being a homosexual is like trying to climb Niagara Falls,” Lark narrates at one point. “Eventually you have to admit: The water is going the other way. If you would only go in its direction, Life would take you right along downstream. Heterosexuality is like having a room ready for you at a hotel: The staff is expecting you – everyone knows his role. The homosexual shows up and has no reservation; he ends up outside; quite literally in the bushes.”
Clearly, we're well outside “It Gets Better” territory. But maybe that's where we should be. Holleran forces us to think of what's being lost in the triumphalist narrative of unending political advancement. What painful wounds, what hollow aches still remain at the core of so many of our lives and have simply been papered over under the banner of progress.
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