![]() ![]() There's a reason Holleran's debut novel was instantly declared a gay classic upon its publication back in 1978. Very much recommended, even it's not your world Holleran is writing about. "Dancer" has haunted me all these years, and I can still open it and feel that sense of longing and loss. Even if you were never on the gay scene, you could identify with Holleran's hero and his hopes for romance. It's suffused with that Japanese quality of mono-no-aware, the fleetingness of all things beautiful and earthly. "Dancer" calls up a world of melancholy dreams, of losing oneself in night and hopeless romances. That world was alien to me, but I shared the clubland belief in the redemptive power of dance and the enchantments of beauty (female beauty, for me). It's set in the lost NYC of the early/mid-'70s, in the gay club world that's lost almost beyond recall. It is that, very much so: a novel of doomed romanticism, memory and all its traps, and dreams of new identity. Someone at the old Atticus Books recommended it as "the gay Gatsby". ![]() ![]() I first read "Dancer From The Dance" long, long ago, in my days at New Haven. ![]()
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