David's Reviews > The Beauty of Men

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."