Grief

by Andrew Holleran

Reeling from the recent death of his invalid mother, an exhausted, lonely professor comes to Washington, D.C. to escape his previous life. What he finds there — in his handsome, solitary landlord; in the city's somber mood and sepulchral architecture; and in the strange and impassioned journals of Mary Todd Lincoln — shows him unexpected truths about America and loss.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Gay, Grief, Queer, Death, Literature

150 pages, Hardcover

First published May 31, 2006

About the author

Born 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.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book, one of my favorites that I've read in the past couple of years and I've read it twice now. Some of the reviews have stated that this book is "barren" and "stilted" and that the narrator is wallowing in his grief. Well, welcome to grief. It's not all wails and tantrums and insights. A good portion of the time we become stunned by grief, which may be viewed as barren or stilted or even wallowing when we can't get out of it quick enough. What's so wonderfully beautiful about this book is that Holleran doesn't go for the theatrics, he keeps the story calm and methodic and it's in this presentation that I found myself completely enshrined in this man's tale of grief, as well as Mary Todd Lincoln's, and all the other tales of grief that pass through the book (each character is grieving in their own way). I just love the glow of this book.

[Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike other writers, Holleran knows he doesn't have to hit the reader over the head to get his ideas across: it's much more effective to crawl under our skin. Grief is a deceptively simple book–short, thematically focused, with only a minimal plotline–but the cumulative effect is powerful and devastating. As the nameless narrator wanders the streets of Washington, DC (with nary a reference to politics, as if we are in a mythic landscape, where the resident of the White House doesn't matter), observes the antics of his quirky landlord, and becomes enthralled by the tragic story of Mary Todd Lincoln, his own feelings are kept at arm's length. He occasionally delves into his immediate grief–the loss of his mother–but under the surface lie the deaths of dozens of others, friends and lovers lost to AIDS. This is the story of an unwitting survivor who, at some level, questions both how he survived and why. The grief is unending, because he believes that's the way to keep the dead forever with him. In so doing, of course, he freezes his own life. Holleran's prose reads like poetry, his characters emerging like modern archetypes, and as a result, the feeling of grief is palpable. It takes only a few hours to read the book, but the emotions it conjures up are lasting. I believe this is Holleran's finest work since the classic Dancer from the Dance. A must-read for anyone who's ever lost–which is all of us.

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andrew Holleran produced "Dancer From the Dance" in the mid-1970s, in the post-Stonewall, pre-HIV disco era. "Dancer" was a swoony romance, the gay "Gatsby". But it was also suffused with a kind of gentle melancholy that Holleran expanded on all through the plague years of the 1980s. "Grief" is Holleran's meditation on loss and living on after grief--- a fine and sympathetic novel, one that draws not only on the survivors' guilt of Holleran's generation but also on the passage of time, on the lives of men now in their fifties.

Holleran's unnamed narrator has moved into rented rooms in a DC townhouse after the death of his elderly mother. His landlord is a 50-something gay man whose life has closed off after the plague years. The narrator, his landlord, and their friends move like ghosts through a winter and early spring in DC, men all too aware of their losses and how time and love have passed them by.

The voice here is pitch-perfect--- Holleran's narrator finds a volume of Mary Todd Lincoln's letters and projects Mary Lincoln's post-1865 life as a permanently grieving widow onto his own losses and past loves. The narration takes up DC in winter as a perfect stage for grief--- a city based on history and the past.

"Grief" is a brief novel, but a deeply affecting one. Very much worth reading.

[Anthony McGill · Rating 4 out of 5]

A FINE WRITER.
I have always listed Andrew Holleran at the top of my favorite "gay" authors and "Grief" continues the high standard you expect from his work. Not a long novel but a beautifully written observation of life and ageing and death, penned by one of the keenest literary minds out there.

Ever since the 1978 classic "Dancer from the Dance" his groundbreaking first novel which surely must be on the short list for "greatest American gay novel," I have loved his books. And this novel is no exception.

Focusing part of the novel around the times of Mary Todd Lincoln and the Washington D.C. locale past and present, adds something very special to this fine book. Not necessarily "a gay novel" but it will resonate strongly with gay readers, many still recovering from the loss of loved ones due to the AIDS epidemic.
Mr. Holleran has written only about six books in thirty years, but all are rich in quality.

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The narrator, having just lost his invalid mother takes a temporary teaching job in Washington. He finds a book about Mary Todd Lincoln in the room he is renting and begins to read the book.
He walks aimlessly around Washington only to find “Despite its museums, its monuments, the city of Washington was a vacant shell…” It is his never ending descriptions of the places he passes as he walks the streets of Washington that, for me, took away from the premise of the book.
Clearly the narrator is searching for something to assuage his grief. Is there a measure of guilt mixed in with his grief? Probably. Why his obsession with Mrs. Lincoln who was never able to let go of her grief? Perhaps he is thinking this is what is in store for him.
This is a terribly sad book, the narrator’s loneliness is soaked into the pages, but then, it is a book entitled “Grief”.

[Christian Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book more. Holleran is great with words and the way he talks about being gay having lived through AIDS, as well as grieving the death of his mother were beautiful and illuminating. But what got to me were the descriptions of life in DC. He touches on the cycle of gentrification and the spacelessness the city has as not a city in Maryland, but the country's city. But I was bored to tears with bland descriptions of the city's attractions and how much he can't connect to any of it if it isn't tied with his current state. If he stuck to the grieving, it would have struck the chord in me, but DC came off as the elder person you have to respect but have no interest in getting to know.

[Jessie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly, what a sad book. The way Holleran writes about grief and loss really cut deep, dang! Gotta sit with this one for a while.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You are wallowing in guilt. The problem with guilt," she said, buttering her roll, "is that the people in life who should feel guilty don't, and the ones who shouldn't do. That's all you can say about guilt."

[Vanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll review it when I finish.

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meditation on aging, grief, and living in gay communities during the Clinton era. I found the writing chose to hid the narrator from view a bit––he lacked agency (and, I believe, a name), which heightened the sense of loss and wandering that is the theme of the book. I was struck by how perceptive he was of other characters' experiences of grief; I'm not sure how much that recounting/sharing helped him navigate his own grief, but the final paragraph seems to demonstrate that he re-arrived at a sense of gratitude for his own life.

A couple of passages I found insightful: the first on the waning of lust that comes with age, mixed with a pessimistic reflection of the past social era under Reagan––

He was a man who'd been riding the rapids of a river, who finally finds a cove, a still pool, and pauses there to catch his breath––though after a while he realizes it's not just a pause, but rather the place he has ended up, beached in the sunlight, exhausted, no longer able to get in that cold and tumultuous river again.

Lastly, I enjoyed the narrator's descriptions of classical music, in how they aided in his grieving process. Although I've not yet lost anyone close to me, this passage made me empathize. It made me feel and understand an emotion I've not necessarily had to feel before. Perhaps this is the power and goal of all important writing:

At almost every concert, no matter how irritating, there was one piece––sometimes only a passage––that made you feel you'd done the right thing in coming here; that someone else (the composer) had understood, had known, your grief, that life was worth living because of music. At the same time, this music, or piece of music, also made it clear that you had been fooling yourself in attempting to go on with your life; that what had happened to the person you loved you would never get over; that you still carried it with you; that it lay beneath all thing; and only this music––these few notes––recognized that everything else you had been doing, and would do, to fill up the time was meaningless.

[Michala · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can I say? This man never disappoints. I didn’t read too much into what this book was about before I began, and I’m glad I didn’t. It was such a nice palette cleanser in a way, although heavy topics are discussed, it was easy for me to read—probably because a lot of these things are still experienced today.

After reading Dancer From The Dance a few weeks ago I was expecting to be introduced to characters like Sutherland. I was pleasantly surprised. Although the book is titled Grief—it isn’t depressing or sad. I didn’t find myself upset reading it. Quite the opposite, I was very keen to get back to the book whenever I could to find out what happened next between this professor and his landlord.

Grief draws a lot on American history to compare feelings, as our main character arrives in Washington. Being from the UK, those were the only parts that I didn’t find massively gripping. My only knowledge of the old US presidents is from Hamilton, I am afraid to say. I feel like if you’re from America or know a lot about it, it would hit even harder.

I found myself wanting things to end a certain way. I wanted the professor to find love with his landlord. And more than anything I wanted to know the landlords name! But at the end, I was satisfied and felt the book served its purpose.

At 150 pages, this is an excellent read and one I would definitely suggest getting a physical copy of if you can.

Holleran is quickly becoming one of my favourite authors. I’m enjoying discovering his different sides and styles.

I like to let my thoughts settle for a while before I write about how I feel. I always review based on just vibes— but I would also like to add that this book, and Dancer From The Dance are the first I’ve read this year that contain no grammatical or spelling errors.

[Cory · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overwrought prose hampered by overstated themes. The classroom scenes, particularly the one where the narrator tries to make an analogy between Lincoln’s assassination and AIDS, were genuinely riveting, a feat for a contemporary novel about an academic; nice to see an author use that setting to actually depict a provocative argument rather than merely engage with the petty crosstalk that so often visits college classrooms in books and so rarely does in reality. I appreciated the book’s brevity, offering an ephemeral glimpse into a conflicted life, and the somber descriptions of wintertime DC too.

Until the end I felt like the book was missing something I couldn’t quite identify, and eventually realized this book–about a man grieving the death of his mother–was lacking any attention to who the narrator’s mother was and what their relationship was like, the narrator only sharing details about her decline. There’s probably a point to that–it’s too painful for the narrator to conjure her in full?–left unstated. But her absence made it difficult to feel completely invested in the narrator’s all-consuming grief. Left me feeling that the grief was more about himself than the person he lost.

[Drew Praskovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really loved this. There aren’t enough novels set in DC.

A melancholic gay man obsessed with Mary Todd Lincoln? Baby that’s REPRESENTATION.

Maybe my favorite Holleran. Really strong character dynamics, examination of place and time.

[Claire Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

A physical manifestation of loneliness. Themes of survivor guilt and flatness and the quiet chaos that came after the aids crisis

It’s one of those books that sits quietly at the back of your mind and drifts slowly through you..

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not everyone will 'like' this book, but I believe it speaks intensively and extensively to those who have reason to grieve. As I put it to a friend, the characters in this book are in one way or another 'bereft'. I purposely don't use the term 'berieved'; its connotations are somehow too conventional.

The characters in the novel are all dealing, to one degree or another, with absence. In the novel's particular context, it is about gay men grieving for the friends and lovers they have lost through AIDS, but also about family (parents in particular). In a more general way, the novel is about connectedness or the keenly felt lack of it with those who are gone or are about to go. Even to Frank's ancient cat who, as Frank says, has shared 16 years of his life and therefore hasn't long to live, has a place in Frank's life that will soon be left empty and with which Frank must deal.

Although there is a great deal in this short novel about gay men and gay life in Washington DC, I feel the gay scene is peripheral to or simply an interesting vehicle for the author's long conversation with grief and the state of being bereft. I lost my second husband to sudden death 22 years ago, but still remember how it felt (and feels) to be bereft, which is perhaps why I view this book as a conversation with grief in all its many forms rather than as a 'gay' novel: grief ranges from 'moving on' through 'marking time' to letting grief rule one's life utterly in the sense that grief can sometimes be a form of death before actual death. I also see echoes in it of my adopted son's bereft-ness: he lost his mother to death when he was only two, and his father to abandonment, and though eleven years have passed for him and he scarcely remembers his mother (as he says, more from photographs than anything else) I can also see that he carries on an emotional conversation -- that changes over time but doesn't disappear -- with grief.

Not everyone will enjoy this book. Some will get hung up by its 'gay' aspect, while some will be bored or repelled by its central theme of grief. But if you have to face the imminent death of someone close to you or have already done so, I think this book will speak not so much to you, as about the questions you have half-formulated about how to live a life that has to accommodate grief somewhere.

[Gwen · Rating 3 out of 5]

"When some terrible misfortune happens it's not just the victim who suffers. There's a ripple effect. Everyone around the victim is affected."

Although Grief is both beautifully and carefully constructed (and at exactly 150 pages, constructed it is), it has a tentative feel, much like that last breath before a long dive. It's as though the author doesn't wish to offend anyone, but in so doing, he doesn't quite reach the level of immediacy one needs in this sort of work. The characters haunt both the streets of Washington and their own tortured lives -- I honestly can't say they weren't in fact ghosts all along, occasionally vibrant, though undoubtedly fleeting.

The narrative seems more parable than novel. Only one speaking character is given a name (Frank, a cancer patient who serves as the both the narrator's lens and social compass, and who naturally tells the narrator what he needs to hear, when he needs to hear it); everyone else is referred to by either their title or their relationship with the narrator. Once again, this not only brings them into only tentative focus, but also a tenuous one: the narrator sets himself apart from the world around him, instead choosing to traverse empty streets, and turning to a volume of Mary Lincoln's letters. Her grief is not only her own, but also the narrator's, and he proceeds to transpose it upon everyone within range.

In fact, even the most minor of characters enjoy the company of historical figures more than each other. They quote Plato and Plutarch over coffee, and refer to the Adams and Lincoln families with abandon. Even in Washington, a city as choked with spirits as it is with smog, this tends to set my suspension of disbelief off its keel.

That isn't to say Grief isn't engaging. It certainly is. In fact, I could scarcely bring myself to put it down, but only in the hope that something -- anything! -- would happen. Still, if it had gone on longer than it did, I may have had difficulty keeping pace with a character who's little more than a footnote in his own life.

[Chana · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lonely middle-aged gay man has cared for his aging mother for years. Now she has died and the man is alone and bereaved. A friend suggests he take a temporary job in D.C. and rent a room from a friend of the friend. The man he will rent from is also a middle aged gay man. So this plan goes forward and nothing else happens except discussions of grief, loneliness, responsibility to the living and the dead. Our main character is in a Washington D.C. that seems empty and he walks around a great deal, going to museums. He lives in a world of near silence. It seems like he is reaching for a closer relationship with the man he is renting from but nothing develops. Middle aged men don't seem to be attracted to each other, they want younger men. The renter snoops in his landlord's private rooms and makes friends with the landlord's dog, letting it out when the landlord is not around.
Eventually our main character goes back home, the end.
What I did like about this book is the concurrent reading, by the main character, of "Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters by Justin and Linda Levitt Turner. That was fascinating and I would like to read that book. There were also some good insights into grief such as, "...grief is what you have after someone you love dies. It's the only thing left of that person. Your love for, your missing, them. As long as you have that, you're not alone - you have them."
That is very true; how I resented anyone who tried to help me "get over" my grief. I felt like they were trying to take my son away from me again.

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a meditation on grief - the main character doesn't evolve or change during the course of the book, he mainly explores his own grief and that of others. I've stayed away from Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking - what reviewers called this book's non-fiction counterpart - because I've had plenty of my own experiences with death in the last few years, and I wasn't sure I wanted to read about how hard it could be. But this being fiction, I wanted to give it a shot. Some of the writing is really very beautifully done - it's careful and spare and conveys a great deal. But I didn't think it was particularly powerful, nor did it ring particularly true, and the characters and story were almost intentionally unengaging. At the end of the day, I think this is really a reflection on particular kinds of grief - the lives of gay men as the U.S. AIDS crisis began to ebb, the life of an adult child who has cared for an ailing parent. Perhaps it says something about grief that not much translates. I think is a worthwhile, and short read, if you come across it, but I wouldn't rush out to get it or put it on the top of the pile.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a sequel to "The Beauty of Men," in which Holleran depicted a closeted son dutifully, but often resentfully, giving his mother weekly outings from a Florida nursing home. In this work, the middle-aged single man, writing in the first person, has moved to Washington D.C. temporarily after his invalid mother has passed away. He is teaching a literature class while working through mixed feelings of guilt, grief and regret that life has passed him by. There is not much "action" in this piece, no hot sex encounters, and no happy ending. Instead it's more of a solitary meditation, as the man hovers between starting a new life for himself or sinking back into the old, sans Mom. He debates this issue with himself on nocturnal strolls around Dupont Circle. A shadowy landlord tries to offer guidance, urging the man to settle in D.C. permanently and get on with a new life and make new friends. But the hero finds himself drawn, instead, by the peculiar letters of Mary Todd Lincoln, who chose obsessive mourning and isolation as the way to live out her life. The book may not be meaningful for 20- and 30-somethings but it may speak powerfully to older gay men who survived the AIDS epidemic and feel haunted by memories of friends and lovers who didn't.

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was beautiful and lovely and also pretty sad and bleak (yep, the clue was in the title). It's a novel about a man who moves to Washington after the death of his mother and rents a room in a house from a gay man in his 50s.

I assumed that that grief part would be about the narrator getting over the death of his mother, but it also seemed to be a general kind of grief (the grief 'lay beneath all things'),with his friend and landlord trying to get on with their lives in a post AIDS world after losing hundreds of friends. The narrators landlord is described as

'one of thousands of gay men who survived AIDS only to realize they are completely alone and have nothing to live for.'

which is incredibly sad... another bit that got to me was when the narrator was teaching a class in Literature and AIDS and said:

'was sitting in a room once a week at a long table talking about something that for these students was simply a historical event being studied in a seminar made me recall, as I led the discussion, all the people who were no longer alive.'

Anyway, along with all of this, there are also lots of lovely bits about walking around Washington and museums and the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln.

[Alicia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book that, not surprisingly, explores the different ways people deal with grief. The main character comes to Washington D.C. to recover from the death of his invalid mother. While in D.C. he connects with a number of his gay friends and they talk about the AIDS epidemic that took so many of their friends. The main character realizes that his guilt at surviving the epidemic and the fact that he never came out to his mother are keeping him locked in the grieving cycle even as others move on into new lives. Paralleling this is his reading of a book of letters of Mary Lincoln, who let grief at the loss of her husband destroy her.

This was an interesting, spare book that provides an unusual portrait of the world of gay men in Washington D.C. however the grief of the protagonist never became real for me. Maybe this is because grief is such a personal experience or because no one can ever see another's grief in its fullness but this book did not have the emotional weight that the title suggested that it would have.

[Bookmarks Magazine]

In his fifth work of fiction, Andrew Holleran, author of the widely praised Dancer from the Dance (1978), explores the complex issues surrounding grief while offering multifaceted impressions of Washington, D.C. Critics praised Holleran's lyrical writing, his subtle and flavorful characterizations, and the beauty of his observations__especially in his evocations of the city. Several admired Holleran's refusal to deal with grief in simplistic terms. John Freeman carped that the novel was a "talky piece of fiction" in which "dialogue nudges the narrative along." But even he admitted that "the languorous beauty of Holleran's observations gives the book bottom and weight." Most critics agree with Michael Upchurch that "this brief, quiet novel may be [Holleran's] best yet."

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Nicholas George · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short novel (almost a novella really) details the story of a gay man who moves to Washington D.C. while coping with the recent death of his mother. He becomes obsessed (and I think obsessed is the right word) with Mary Todd Lincoln's actions after the death of Abraham Lincoln, and draws many parallels and lessons from the way she handles grief to his own. It's a device that smacks a little too much of gimmickry, even though it is a valid device and Holleran is a very good writer. I appreciated this most of all for its prose and tried to ignore some of the more obvious machinations of its structure.

[Virgowriter (Brad Windhauser)]

The parts I appreciated were also responsible for what I thought could have been strengthened. In terms of form, the book makes excellent use of pacing and presents a fluid handling of time that is, at times, very engaging; at other times, I thought the author should have slowed a bit and deepened character-I wanted more of the narrator's interior life. Still, there' some great prose. At times, the 'point' of the book is fed to the audience in dialogue rather than rendered and felt. Still worth a read.

[Rowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not bad! This is a short novel, only 150 pages, that is so detailed, you take a long time to read it. I think it’s fun to read; it’s a tour of Washington D.C. and a history lesson. Politics are addressed, and I would describe the ideas as edgy, politically incorrect, brave, and they serve to create real intimacy between the main characters. I’m surprised SJWs haven’t held a pitchfork party and burned all copies of this book. Likely, not enough people have read it. Natalie Goldberg mentions it in LET THE WHOLE THUNDERING WORLD COME HOME, her newest memoir. All the cool people are reading it.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holleran renders grief remarkably, tying the mental breakdown of Mary Todd Lincoln to the ghost-like existence of an aging gay professor who survived the plague. "[Mary] was a ghost, a reminder of something the country wanted to put behind it." Rightly, the narrator is given a friend (Frank), who is so engaging, smart and funny, he saves the book from unbearable bleakness. Grief is a sleek and wonderful novel.

[Kyle Heiner · Rating 5 out of 5]

soothing. it’s small yet all-encompassing; a welcome accompaniment both for my present now and holleran’s previous work, The Beauty Of Men. there’s a winter chill in the pages that’s numbing as grief itself. i felt myself strolling dupont right there with him. oh listless guilt and abject misery!! this novel is a poem ripe to revisit..

[Annie · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you want to lose the will to live read this book.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grief opens when a profoundly lonely middle-aged gay professor (who remains nameless to keep distance from us readers) takes a short-term teaching position in Washington D.C. following the death, of his mother. While in the city, he rents a room at another man’s home. The novel then follows the protagonist as he grieves and holds on to his belief that the dead stay with us if we continue to grieve.

Other characters include:

• the landlord of the home where the narrator takes temporary residence. He is a gay, middle-aged man who appears to have given up on life and protects himself from love and intimacy by chasing far younger men. He, too, remains nameless to keep distance from his tenants and us.
• the narrator’s cancer-ridden friend, Frank, who argues that there is no bringing back from the dead one who is gone. Grief only serves the griever.
• a now dead mutual friend of the landlord and narrator, Nick, who believed in the power of the human mind and will. He thought he had done all he could to remain healthy and beautiful but died of AIDS while young years earlier.
• Nick’s mother who, in a conversation with the narrator, argues that “when we die, our bodies and brains have stopped. Hence there is no consciousness. Hence, we cannot wake up. It's merely a false extrapolation people want to make because they cannot bare the thought of their own extinction.”

To further develop this theme, the author of the novel includes frequent references to the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln who was unable to let go of the children and husband she lost to death. He also includes discussions among gay men who survived the AIDS epidemic while watching friends and lovers die and reminds readers that few gay men now in their late 50s and 60s exist because of the plague.

At one point the narrator states that “our age, our solitary status, the fact that we had survived something so many friends of ours had not... was one reason no doubt I simply walked around the halls but never touched a human being: the presence of the dead.”

The narrator and other characters who are survivors of the AIDS epidemic now live with survivor’s guilt unable to form close attachments with other people. In fact, the narrator seems closest to his landlord’s dog and the long-dead Mary Todd Lincoln while imagining he and his landlord are a family. Furthermore, only when the professor’s time is almost at an end can the landlord risk moments of intimacy as though knowing he would likely never see his tenant again.

Besides its themes of survivorship, the death of a family member and/or loved one, and the premature death of a person, the novel explores the theme of life for gay men in a straight world.
Frank argues that gay men are normal and want what all people want—love and companionship. He states that they “were looking for love... [and] thought they could get love from sex.”

However, not understanding the “normalcy” of gay men, a nameless student in the narrator’s class becomes belligerent during a discussion and argues that those who died of AIDS had a choice about how they expressed themselves sexually so could still be alive. Later he tells the professor that his brother had died of the disease and that he had been the sole caregiver since his mother rejected her gay son.

Finally, having internalized much of society’s dislike of gay persons, and feeling scarred by the many losses he suffered during the AIDS epidemic, the narrator reveals that he never told his mother his sexual orientation so feels a great guilt and loss over hiding from her this essential part of himself.

He concludes that his mother “had the misfortune to become dependent on a child who was a closeted homosexual, who had kept his real life from her for years, so that when he took care of her there was nothing but him and her – no life, no family of his own, nothing but his own solitude.”

Though shaped by Holleran’s own experiences watching so many friends and lovers die, this is not “just a gay novel.” Nor is it “just an AIDS novel.” Instead, this novella is almost a meditation of what it means to live while others die.

The protagonist, who thinks often of the meaning he found in life as he cared for his dying mother, concludes that grief provides a link between the living and the dead and is all that remains of the deceased person.

If grief lasts, the survivor is not alone.

Returning home, the narrator says that “the minute I entered the house, my grief returned; and I fell to my knees between my parents’ beds with a deep gratitude and said a prayer: Thank you God, for bringing me home safely. Blessed be the Lord, bless my father and mother.”

Though not necessary for an understanding of Grief, after reading this short book told with quiet calm and precision, the reader may find it interesting to read Holleran’s other novels: Dancer from the Dance (1978), Nights in Aruba (1983), and The Beauty of Men (1996). When read in order, these stand-alone novels become almost a single story of the search for love and consequences of intimacy.

[Richard Cho · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last year, I read quite a few gay literature, including this one Grief by Andrew Holleran. I believe I would have surely given this book a 5-star rating have I not read Sebald's books: They feature a lot of aimless walking around the city reflecting upon a specific historicity of that place. Sebald perfected the genre.

Nevertheless, I quite enjoyed this novel, which seems to harbor no intention for plot except that it is about a middle aged gay man who just lost his mother. He moves to Washington D.C. to a house whose landlord is also a middle-aged gay man, and hangs out with a friend who is also a middle aged gay man. They share and reflect on gay lives, the AIDS crisis, the particular loneliness of a middle-aged gay men, etc.

What I seem to understand from these gay novels is that homosexuals are more promiscuous than heterosexuals, mainly because the sex they have has 0% chance of conceiving a life, hence sex for them is all pleasure, whereas heterosexuals always have the danger of conceiving, regardless of whether the man had vasectomy or the woman is taking a pill. There always is a chance. In these novels, the casualness and easiness with which these characters talk about sex clubs and "cruising" sometimes amuse me.

I liked the narrator a lot; his tendency for deep introspection mirrored my tendency. His take on grief, which is the main force driving his daily routine, was very agreeable to me, especially the aspect that sometimes, we just cannot get over our grief.

His writing is meticulous. Really good.

-----------------------------

"I mean the only cure for grief is time, but some people need more than others--some people in fact may never have enough time. Not everyone move on."
"Because grief is what you have after someone you love dies. It's the only thing left of that person. Your love for, your missing, them. And as long as you have that, you're not alone--you have them."
P. 18

At fifty-five things had stopped happening to him, I suspected. Nothing happened to him anymore. or rather: Everything that did had already happened before--many, many times.
In other words, my landlord, like most of us, had accumulated a set of habits--routines that were the substance of his day, a daily rosary that ended when he made sure...
P. 39

One day while perusing my landlord's youth I noticed the dog had stood up. Slowly she advanced to my feet, where she stopped and looked up at me, as if to ask what I meant. Then she went back to her little piece of ratty yellowed carpet and lay down.
P. 43

My landlord was, so far as I could tell, like many gay men of a certain age, celibate--because of AIDS, or an inability to attract the partners they wanted, or simply diminishing interest. But he was still angry about the milieu in which he had grown up. Despite his job, his life in the city, his house, there was still something anxious about him--like a man who's entered a witness protection program but thinks even in his new town he may be assassinated. He no longer had sex, but he got all the more angry when anyone challenged his right to do so.

..."but I suspect casual sex is beyond him now. Because there's nothing casual about sex to a man who's looking at the problem of long-term nursing home insurance. Who's wondering who will drive him to the hospital when he has to go--who, when he looks up on those quiet evenings at home and wonders, why he is alone, hears a voice say: 'Because we spent out lives having the sort of sex that was accompanied by an unwritten guarantee that it was completely dissociated from any form of emotional or social attachment whatsoever.' I mean how many of us were ever really able to integrate sex with the rest of our lives? And now we realize we're not looking for sex anymore--we're looking for fidelity. Tenderness! Intimacy! And that's why he's going to put an ad in the Personals."

...that home for which everyone is looking.

Homosexuality had been linked to liberal traditions of enlightenment and tolerance; it was now an accepted part of American culture--the ongoing extension of freedom to include more and more groups, the package a college provided the middle-class student so that he or she could live successfully with "diversity"--though I never relinquished the suspicion that the audience was being politically correct. Their real thoughts involve disgust, I would always think as I walked home through the winter darkness....
P. 76

I must be special--to one person. Otherwise, frankly, I don't see the point.

"What is home?" "Where someone waits for you."

"Yes, well," he said, "you have to move on."
"But you don't," I said. "You don't have to move on."

"I killed my mother with boredom. She had the misfortune to become dependent on a child who was a closeted homosexual, who had kept his real life from her for years, so that when he took care of her there was nothing but him and her--no life, no family of his own, nothing but his own solitude."

Grief is like Osiris; cut up in parts and thrown into the Nile. It fertilizes in ways we cannot know, the pieces of flesh bleed into every part of our lives, flooding the earth, till eventually Life appears once more.