HIGH GEAR Page 17

Gay novel makes it; reviewers don't

By R. Woodward

A reader approaching Andrew Holleran's novel Dancer from the Dance could easily be confused by knowing how it has been greeted by New York reviewers. It has been hailed with the phrase "gay novel of

perhaps than any other on earth."

Dealing minutely, often obsessively, with his own immediate environment, the fictional narrator continually forgets that he is not covering

plicat negative criticism of their characters would probably have been overlooked by them in being flattered that important

hypnotic, and many a reader whose attention is smoothly directed from sentence to sentence will find that this is a most

found ourselves in a sea of humanity, how stunned I was to recognize no more than four or five faces?... I used to say that "He is unaware that the tale he tells

the year," which manages to be life and reality in general. He is regional folklore... every bit as quaint

at the same time both misleading and too vague to easily contradict. The phrase suggests a more wide-ranging

uses the word "everyone" in so many sentences which clearly tell only what was said, thought, felt and done by himself and his

as

as what Washington Irving told us

work than this book claims to acquaintances that the word about Ichabod Crane or Rip Van Winkle."

be.

A very evocative depiction of a very limited milieu, it deals with the food for obsession readily available in certain parts of New York for a handsome, intelligent young man named Malone. In his late twenties, feeling empty and loveless, he discovers his gay leanings and decides that love must be his quest, having in the back of his head, from early religious training, the image of saints leaving behind mundane concerns to devote themselves to salvation.

Without affection, responsive to the moods and feelings of others. Malone is able to achieve what in the circle he inhabits is regarded as the highest goal of existence: complete self-indulgence without self-parody.

One of the novel's chief fictions is that most of what we are told of Malone comes from the manuscript of a fictional writer sent to a friend of his for comment. This fictional narrator, eager to impose his own sense of reality on a person whom he and his friends have found attractive, has devised a paean to Malone's "Innocent heart."

Presupposing some massive joint consciousness in which all with a homosexual orientation are one, he makes Malone out to be its most intense and vivid representative. Malone is, we are told, "the most romantic creature of a community whose citizens are more romantic

NE

OR

seems to be a fetish. He is

unaware that the tale he tells is regional folklore, dealing with a somewhat different milieu, but every bit as quaint as what Washington Irving told us about Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle.

Whether due to carelessness or unbridled eagerness to have some New York gay oriented novel over which to enthuse, or due to a combination of both of these, most of the reviews of Dencer from the Dance (mostly from New York) have paid scant heed to how Andrew Holleran qualifies his fictional narrator. To make especially clear that the narrator's viewpoint is not his own, Holeran ends the novel with a letter that this narrator receives from an ever-criticizing friend which contains the following: "Do you realize what a tiny fraction of the mass of homosexuals we were? That day we marched to Central Park and

there were only seventeen

homosexuals in New York, and we knew every one of them; but there were tons of men in that city who weren't on the circuit, who didn't dance, didn't cruise, didn't fall in love with Malone... We never saw them."

One suspects that a number of New York reviewers so completely share certain of the fictional narrator's traits that it does not occur to them to regard these traits as being

faults or limitations. Most noticeable of these shared traits are a penchant for proclaiming oneself the representative of everybody and a pre-Galileo view of the universe that vaguely supposes that the earth is flat and that one falls off into an un-

speakable void by moving west of the Hudson River.

If Don Quixote, the Wife of Bath, or Grendel's mother had read what their respective authors wrote of them, any im-

IF YOU BELIEVE

organized religion is the greatest enemy of gay liberation,

we will send you a free copy of GALA Review published by the Gay Atheist League of America Write: GALA, P.O.Box 14142, San Francisco CA 94114

D

authors had devoted much of their best styles to depicting them.

Andrew Holleran is himself an important author on the evidence of this, his first novel, and his best style is very good indeed. With a knack for vivid description and an excellent sense of rhythm, he writes prose that is often compelling, at times

difficult book to stop reading.

Tha: many who would praise him know not themselves, and that their judgments are at times impaired by a haze of selfsatisfaction, does not mean that anyone should take this novel as being any less excellent, in and of itself, as a work of art. It is not necessarily the artist's fault when a number of people use his work as a back-scratcher.

National City Barber

precision haircutting for the discriminating male

conveniently located in the national city bank building

ASK US ABOUT OUR 'EUROPEAN BOW ́

CALL PETER AT 241-2305

Shop

HIGH GEAR T-SHIRTS

CEAR

HAIRCUTTING WAVING

46 Coventry 371-1627 17124 Detco 52:264

621-2191 Get it out of

your system

IRON-ON LOGO-$2.50 P.PD.

T-SHIRT-

include size) SEND TO

-$6.00 P.PD.

HIGH GEAR T-SHIRT OFFER

P.O. BOX 6177

CLEVELAND OH 44101

EP