I'm getting older. No, let's not be American about it: I'm old. Stories are very comforting when they tell you about yourself as you'd like to be. They're less comforting when they hold a mirror to ourselves as we are.
This isn't a comforting story for me to read.

Dancer from the Dance was the roadmap for how I wanted to be in the 1970s: Rooms full of men pounding each other's brains out? Parties with mind-altering substances galore?! Sign me up! I'm ready to start this kind of life! This book, not so much.

Mostly because illness, isolation, and the slightly tedious repetitiveness of sex are my reality, and aren't very interesting to me unless they're freshly observed. Let's be honest, what's ever going to make this stuff fresh to those within it? It is not, as far as I can see, possible to make excitement and anticipation from the routine, mundane, quotidian life of Getting Old. Bearing in mind as I do daily that getting old is a privilege denied to most people, it is a curiously samey process. I'm aware that there are people aging vigorously and pursuing, in their seventies, activity levels I never attained. I'm also aware that I am stunningly lucky not to be dead or permanently cognitively impaired after January 2023's strokes. I don't mean there's only one way to get old: I mean getting old, no matter which way you slice it, has certain common themes that don't rev my readerly engine above idle speed.

I looked over what I've just written, thought "this doesn't sound like a four-star review," and called my Young Gentleman Caller to read it to him. Thank goodness I did! After A Long Silence, he finally said, "Tedious repetitiveness? Thanks a lot." Explaining to him what I actually meant, aside from reassuring his bruised feelings about my real opinion of his prowess, clarified the subject that's bothered me about the book since I read it.

Holleran's over a decade older than I am. As I read about the life he was describing, I thought about the sameness of the unnamed PoV character's life as repetitive, even...perhaps especially...his unchanged relationship to sex. The expectation of desire for the same kind of sex into one's older age isn't a sign of vigor to me, but a sign of arrested adolescence. The concerns about isolation, in that context, also read as adolesent fears of not being Hot, of never finding friends/boyfriends/partners when it feels like everyone around you has them, in general of FOMO.

Seriously? You're still on about this? is what I'd say to this guy if I met him. I don't want an orgy or a three-way anymore, I want to spend that hour and a half in the more rewarding, interesting leisurely touching, stroking, and communing with Rob, the man I know and want to know better. That's a whole different experience from cruising the porn store as does our aging Casanova. Part of that is, again, down to my good luck. There is someone in my life who elicits these feelings from me, and is willing to reciprocate them. That's what I thought Earl meant to our PoV character, whose lack of a name feels to me like a reinforcement of this guy's utter and complete adolescent narcissism. "Only I am Real, everyone else is an extra in the movie of my life." And this is in spite of the fact that PoVman is basically spending the whole of his time in this book narrating Earl's decline and fall into the Endless!

Oh dear, again I'm veering into the not-highly-rating territory.

This is why I've had such trouble reviewing the book. It's a much better literary experience than I'm making it sound like. Look at the thoughts it's causing me to examine! Look at the depth of attention it summons out of me! I'm having interesting, important conversations with my Young Gentleman Caller because I need his help to process my feelings about the read.

Author Holleran is a fine wordsmith, with an opera librettist's ear for sentences that sing in my ear:
I believed somehow in the absurd idea that if you ate right you could live indefinitely. Even when, a decade after my mother‘s death, I began getting skin cancers, all I could think of was: how could this be? Given all the broccoli I’ve eaten? It must be loneliness, I concluded, the lack of a person to live for other than myself, since we are also told that health is psychosomatic.
–and–
The town to which Earl and my father retired was not one of those artificial communities created for people in the last stage of life with which Florida is associated. But it had its share of the elderly. It was good to be reminded by the Regular of another stage of life, especially when I stopped off at the post office on my way home from his shack. The people moving slowly toward the post office on walkers when I went to get the mail induced both pity and admiration; pity for their condition, admiration for their determination to keep going.
–and–
The Church believes in the Resurrection, and at the Resurrection the body and soul are united. What age the body is, and exactly how the two are rejoined , I don’t know; when I asked my friend, he said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that one.”

There's a lot of this kind of thoughtful, careful observation in the book. Given the gargantuan tragedy and Black-Death-level reaping of the men in his generation's cohort, observing is safer than involving. The porn store isn't a casual or haphazard choice for the narrator's sex life. The reporting of life is safer than the living of it:
One of the great appeals of Florida has always been the sense that the minute you get here you have permission to collapse.
–and–
Leaving Florida, nevertheless, I always felt regret; though when I found myself back in New York my mother's voice on the telephone seemed so shrunken and small, I vowed that I would never waste time in that town again. How could I? I was not responsible for her happiness; she wanted me to live, and life was wasted every day I was there. Look how the noiseless spider, the relentless metronome, the secret thief, had staked their claim on even these two people, these once glamorous parents who had turned into a pair of country mice.
–and–
Florida was where they lived, where I kept coming back, though nobody asked me questions anymore about what I was doing. One day, when I was sitting in the back seat of the car as we were waiting for a railroad train to go by on our way to the mall, my mother turned back to me and said, apropos of something I forget, "You are a separate person, you know," but I felt I wasn't. I couldn't get away from them, which is why I kept coming back to Florida.
–and–
I see in the distance on streets I don’t usually take, merely because I can see the glow of blue and green lights, the two most satisfying Christmas colors, no doubt because they are so melancholy.

I didn't find my life changed by this book but I did find in it much to interrogate, about myself, my present, my past; and that's a very rare thing for a book to do in a world of escapism and avoidance of the depths of experience. That Author Holleran did this while using surfaces and appearances and absences made it impressive to me on a literary level while keeping me at a greater distance from PoVman's life than I'd require to give the book my highest accolades.

Make no mistake, this is a good book. It's not great, but it's good, and I hope you'll read it one day soon.

Maybe borrow it from the library, though.

The novel started off very well and the characters are interesting. Somehow the novel loses traction towards the end and the conclusion is a bit disappointing.

The Kingdom of Sand is a poignant tale of desire and dread. The nameless narrator is a gay man who moved to Florida to look after his aging parents during the height of the AIDS epidemic, and has now found himself unable to leave after their deaths. With gallows humour, he chronicles the indignities of growing old in a small town.

This is my first read by Andrew Holleran. The writing is beautiful and evocative, filled with sadness and loss. A poignant chronicle of aging and loneliness, and gayness and a testament to the importance of human contact.

I rated this a 3 but if it were available would actually give it a 3.5.

1 "just can't do it, soul sucking, woe is he" star !!

Thank you to Netgalley and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux for an ecopy. This was released June 2022 and I am providing an honest review.

This review is only for the first 20 percent of the book as I could just not move further in.

The one star is for the moderately good literary prose.

I do not have the fortitude to read about the observations and complaints of a self-pitying, self-absorbed, gay, voguish depressive gentleman. Sorry not sorry !

I acknowledge that by stopping at 20 percent I may be missing a minor masterpiece. I will take that chance.

This might be more palatable to me as three tracks on a Morrissey album.

Thank you to NetGalley, FSG Books, and Andrew Holleran for this ARC. I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Took me 6 months to finish this book and the first books I have finished in a month in a half, however that is not entirely this books fault.

This book is deep, chilling, but important. I had to take more breaks than I can remember from it because of how nonchalantly and detailed the author talks about gay death, grief, the elderly, and the process of dying.

This book’s strengths like the author previous work is how vivid his depictions of queer life is with vocabulary I have yet to see replicated by any other authors. Holleran is describe the highs and lows of any life event like an entry in the phone book, but in this weirdly beautiful poetic, but also mundane way.

If you are a fan of literary fiction I think you will love this book. However, trigger warning for every and any sad topic under the sun almost with this book not being for the faint of heart.

All this being said I think the themes within as mentioned earlier are important to read and I’m happy I put in the work to read more from Holleran!

i’m back from minneapolis & while i’m still not feeling 100% (stomach has been off since the race!), i’m back with another very overdue review to kickoff the long weekend.

the book follows a nameless gay man who moved to florida during the height of the aids epidemic when his parents needed help but has stayed even after they have passed. telling stories of what it’s like growing old in a small town, the book centres around his friendship with earl, a man he met cruising 20 years ago. together, they watch classic films, gossip about the neighbours, and can truly be themselves. as earl’s health begins to decline, our narrator distracts himself from the fact that when earl passes he will be truly alone, by visiting walgreens & engaging in sex at the video porn store.

i haven’t read any of holleran’s novels that made him so popular, but i did really enjoy this one, enough that i want to read his other books. the narrator’s dry wit paired with the compassion & love he feels for earl were beautiful. it truly is a book about loneliness and the need for human connection, and i felt myself relating to the narrator more than i thought i would.

“The near-universal praise for this book is deserved. Andrew Holleran has been quietly chronicling American gay life for more than 40 years. While Dancer from the Dance will likely remain his best known work, his latest may in fact be his best.”

I'm having a hard time rating this read. It was beautifully written, almost poetic in style. But I walked away at the end feeling a deep sadness that it took days to shake. I suppose that speaks to the author's abilities, but I don't know how I feel about it. The overall theme I believe is about aging and the inevitability of it all as well as how we should enjoy what we have as dying is unavoidable, but it all felt so nihilist. Giving this a middle-of-the-road rating for the great writing and obvious skill of the author.

**Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the eARC**

DNF- This book was fine. It was beautifully written and the cultural references were advanced. I mostly just found the story unrelatable. An old white, cis gay man talks about pervasive and impeding loneliness, death and change in his life. Nothing happened in the book. The unnamed narrator really just wallows for 200 pages. There's little plot. However, I appreciate The Kingdom of Sand for what it is. It's influential and for the people who see themselves in it, important. I just didn't. I don't really care for white people in stories all that much.

I have been a rabid fan of the writing of Andrew Holleran since first reading his fiction in Christopher Street Magazine in the 70’s and his powerful essays in New York Native in the 80’s. His reporting on and ability to humanize the AIDS epidemic was a balm to those of us living through the plague years. Holleran’s novel Dancer From the Dance is still the best novel ever written about the relentless pursuit of beauty in the gay male world of Fire Island and New York City.

The Kingdom of Sand, the newest work of fiction by Holleran is filled with the same sterling prose and perfectly written sentences. The narrator is nameless but reads autobiographical. The mood is damp, slow, elegiac. The story is anti-plot and rudderless. A white gay male of a certain age haunts his north Florida town. This is a story about men becoming ghosts. It is beautifully rendered. As expected.

https://openlettersreview.com/posts/the-kingdom-of-sand-by-andrew-holleran
The Kingdom of Sand 
by Andrew Holleran
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022

By Michael Adams

The publication of the novel Dancer from the Dance in 1978 came as a revelation to gay readers long hungry for a book both reflective of their lives and superbly written. Michael Cunningham dubbed it, in 2018, “the first Big Gay Literary Sensation.” The writer: a 35-year-old Harvard grad and first-time novelist, Eric Garber, who chose “Andrew Holleran” as a pseudonym to keep his family unaware of his sexuality. Ironic that.

Midcentury gay men who looked for literary mirrors did so largely in vain. True classics—Giovanni’s Room, A Single Man, The City and the Pillar—were rare and restricted by the mores of the times; others were depressingly bleak (Last Exit to Brooklyn, City of Night), pure kitsch (The Lord Won’t Mind), melodrama (The Front Runner), or a wee bit late-to-the-party (Maurice). And as for Mary Renault, bless her for trying.

But Dancer was something else. Intelligent, witty, sensual, with lush, hypnotic prose, it captured the post-Stonewall explosion of pride, lust, drug-induced, rampant sexual license, and self-indulgence as embodied by (some of) the gay men of New York in the hothouse enclaves of Greenwich Village and Fire Island. The book is equally seductive and cautionary: excesses of sex and drugs can result in ecstasy, but can break hearts and bodies as well.

Holleran brought a poet’s touch to this world, where physical perfection was (is?) king:

There were people so blessed with beauty ... they did not know what to do with it.... Everyone was a god, and no one grew old in a single night. No, it took years for that to happen ... For what does one do with Beauty—that oddest, most traditional of careers? There were boys ... bank tellers, shoe salesmen, clerks, who had been given faces and forms so extraordinary that they constituted a vocation of their own. They rushed out each night to simply stand in rooms about the city, exhibiting themselves to view much as the priest on Holy Saturday throws open the door of the Tabernacle to expose the chalice within.

He was also a pitiless critic: “Have you ever noticed,” says one character, “that gay men secrete everything in each other’s presence but tears? They come on each other, they piss on each other, or shit, but never tears! The only sign of tenderness they never secrete in each other’s presence.”

Holleran also serves up generous dollops of camp, most often in the creation of Sutherland, a doomed, tragicomic queen bee, usually heavily costumed and sexually desperate: Here he is,

hanging out his window in an orange wig, frilly peasant blouse, and gas-blue beads, screaming in Italian to the people passing on the street to come up and suck his twat. “I’ve been sitting at home all afternoon hoping to receive the stigmata,” he said, closing the autobiography of Saint Theresa he was reading when he began his impersonation of a Neapolitan whore, “but all I got were invitations to brunch this weekend. No more quiches, please! One could die of quiches!”

It’s impossible to read the book unaware of what would arrive with such dark result in the next decade, when AIDS began its relentless march, decimating the community and instilling gay writers with both fury and purpose. Larry Kramer, once reviled for the novel Faggots, his impassioned jeremiad against sexual promiscuity, published the same year as Dancer, was suddenly a Cassandra (but often grudgingly appreciated). He abandoned fiction for a time, co-founded the political protest group ACT-UP—and channeled his creativity energy into the theater: The Normal Heart has proven to be one of the enduring AIDS-related works of the era; it’s lost little of its potency over the years. While Holleran could not have foreseen a plague, he sensed that such decadence could not be sustained. As one character writes to another,

We were lunatics I’m sorry to say. Our lovers weren’t real. Wasn’t that the strangest thing of all? The way we loved them? … Were we cowards? Shy girls waiting to be serenaded? Or did we all suspect that half the beauty and the shimmer of that life was in our own hypnotic hearts and not out there? … You know, we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality, I think. In that order. Anyway, that’s why I left—the madness of it all offended me.

In the four decades after Dancer, Holleran published four novels, a volume of short stories, and a book of essays. The novels together form a quartet of sustained melancholy.] Largely vanished is the gorgeous, luxuriant poetry of Dancer, as is much of the joy. The nameless first-person narrators of three of the novels, and Lark, the center of the third-person-narrated The Beauty of Men, share so many of the details of Holleran’s own life that fiction and memoir blend: A childhood in the Caribbean recalled during a sexually prolific adulthood in New York City (Nights in Aruba); a move to a small town (Christian and conservative) near Gainesville, Florida, to care for his ailing parents (The Beauty of Men); a sojourn in Washington, DC, (Grief) and a return to the small town, presumably to live out his last years—much of the time ruminating on loneliness, aging, the overwhelming legacy of AIDS, desultory sexual contacts, and death (The Kingdom of Sand). It is in many ways an unrelentingly dispiriting quartet.

Kingdom’s narrator is in his 60s, still occupying his late parents’ home for reasons he can’t quite understand, and there he’s surrounded by furniture, clothes, figurines and art objects hoarded over the years, none of which he can bring himself to discard. His sex life is one of endless frustration: the video store where anonymous hook-ups are possible make him feel old, yet he returns there with dreary regularity. His only predictable release is orally serving a partnered neighbor without reciprocation who stares passively at the TV during the act.

Holidays are more avoidance than celebration. Halloween is spent hiding in a walk-in closet with a flashlight and a book; on Thanksgiving he cooks the traditional meal and eats alone; and he agrees to visit his sister out of town for Christmas only because he hasn’t the nerve to decline.

A substantial portion of Kingdom is devoted to Earl, the narrator’s “only friend,” a gay retired community college teacher, 20 years his senior, who leaves a near-reclusive life with three dogs, an impressive collection of classic movie DVDs and opera recordings, and an unused bathroom that has become a “cockroach cemetery” of insect corpses never discarded.

Earl himself as a major eccentric is far less interesting than the narrator’s obsessive interest in him [nice], which lasts for two decades—not exactly love or even affection, but certainly one of jealous nature when Earl’s handyman vies for the older man’s attention. The narrator himself is perplexed at Earl’s hold on him, but records this epiphany:

I thought of death as the motel we would go into when we stopped on our drive out west to see if the room would be acceptable: that is, something the older person would have to do. That your father will die before you is a given—part of the scheme of things. And after my own died, Earl was the buffer between me and death ... a person I was observing for the slightest signs of decline.

Observing decline and death seem to be the book’s raison d’etre. (“Keep death daily before your eyes” is its St. Benedict epigraph). There are lengthy litanies of dead neighbors and friends and the diseases or accidents that killed them. Holleran has lost none of his acute, penetrating vision. On viewing his mother’s corpse:

Death had already started to alter the color of her skin from flesh to marble. The cessation of her heart had taken away from her circulating blood, the élan vital, that animates human beings; she was shutting down the way a tree dies limb by limb till there’s not a green leaf on it, the way she’d told me to fall asleep when I was a child by relaxing my extremities one by one.

A great deal of Thanatos, but little regard for Eros, although it’s always top of mind:

The idea of touching an actual person was becoming increasingly unimaginable, for not only was I wasting enormous amounts of time watching porn—unless no time that is devoted to erotic matters is wasted—but watching sex on film (where nothing could go wrong) had made me reluctant to have sex in reality where so much can…. I’d found myself the day before standing at the stove … when I began pushing my groin at the oven door; and when I went over to the kitchen sink I began to hump it. I need to check into the hospital … and ask the nurse to hook me up to an IV—an IV filled with semen.

My first reading of The Kingdom of Sand left me frustrated and sad. Frustrated because I had hoped that after 16 years Holleran had somehow transcended the world of his three previous novels and ceased to rehearse his favorite obsessions. I had also hoped that perhaps he would be the one to bring us the Great AIDS Novel that has yet to arrive. His age (79) and the long silence between Grief and Kingdom do not augur well for an imminent burst of creativity.

But rereading—this time looking at the trees, not the forest—I had to own up to my sensitivity to the author’s decline and mortality. (I’m close enough on his temporal heels to count the hairs on the back of his neck.) I began to realize that he in some ways my Earl, a way of monitoring my own decline. And it was not always comfortable. (OK, never comfortable.) From a second read, I once again fell in love with his forthright prose, unfailingly honest but frequently touching and tender—and frequently razor-sharp.

He ends the book with a chapter boasting an excellent title, “Two Loves Have I At Walgreens,” that could easily serve as a standalone short story. It’s a typical Christmas for the narrator—marked by loneliness, depression, two unrequited crushes (dubbed Edgar Allan Poe and the Boy with Bette Davis eyes, both employees of Walgreens)—but here he allows a measure of ... what? pleasure? sentimental warmth? to seep into his life, inspired by his neighbors’ clichéd Christmas traditions and his expectations (however unlikely) of a Walgreen’s tryst.

“One must be grateful for what one has,” he tells us. An atypical banality from Holleran, but here it comes as a welcome ray of sun piercing the clouds.

If it wasn't for the rambling and the stream of consciousness, which I don't care for, I would have rated this book a five. This novel is linked to Holleran's brilliant book "Grief." However, this is not a brilliant novel. Loneliness, sadness, and death pervades this book, which sometimes can be exhausting for the reader, as well as depressing. Although, the writing is at times beautiful there were sections that I felt were pointless and repetitious. As a reader, I felt that at times I was in a loop. How many times do I needed to be told that the narrator needed to hire a car service to get to the airport, or that Earl's house lights were on or off? Thank you to NetGalley, FSG, and Macmillan audio for the advance copy.

The jury is still out on this one for me. Its not that I didn't like it, I think it was beautifully written and honest, but there wasn't much of a plot, but I'm pretty sure that was the point of the book, I'm still debating if I liked it or not. I think I just need more time to process!

Old Father Time is catching up with our narrator – a gay man living in Florida - in this honest and revealing tale of life, love, loneliness, and ageing challenges (and shuffling off our mortal coil).

Right from the off, it drew me in. I was intrigued by its ‘noirish’ feel. I could almost hear the narrative as though it were a backdrop to a black and white movie or a tape-recorded ‘confessional’. The many references to classic films were a bonus since, as a fan, I quickly built empathy with the characters.

The author’s bittersweet, wry humour, as well as his painstakingly detailed, observational writing style, was beautiful.

It may have painted the world as a little too black and white, though, seen through the lens of “the tray hanging from the neck of the cigarette girl in one of those thirties movies”, which perhaps made it a little one-sided in its portrayal of the silver-haired generation. My only real criticism, I suppose, was that the author took a long time to get to the point by re-treading on old ground.

Enjoyable nonetheless. Whether we acknowledge it or not, there is a little bit of us all in this work.

My thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for granting this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book is so beautifully written - its exquisite detail made me feel I was there with the narrator in the spaces - the homes that still contain the possessions of his parents who are no longer living, or his friend Earl's collection of movies, books and music. There is a sense of loss and nostalgia and longing that is woven throughout -- and because it was so visually descriptive I could see a movie being made from this, albeit with a slow, lingering pace such as early Terrance Davies or Gus Van Sant. It is an incredible reflection on growing older and being lonely and observing other lives (there are great passages of the narrator walking down streets looking at TV lights flickering through a window or Christmas displays.) This book is also about being gay in conservative Florida and how to navigate being oneself vs. being in the closet. A beautiful book and I highly recommend it. I just bought some of the author's previous books and look forward to reading them.

Thank you to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giraux for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Another well chronicled, memoir like novel by Andrew Holleran. His keen eye and the beauty of his prose explores gay life, the fears of aging and the realities of dying alone. As a mound of sand can slowly diminish over time, we learn of a path well traveled, his parents, friends, sexual identities, AIDS, medical diagnoses, death and the shame and often guilt associated with the wants and needs to eliminate (if only temporarily), the loneliness.
Set in rural Florida, the recollection of time, places and people is a travelogue of tenderness and desire. Holleran’s novels are consistently recommended reads and The Kingdom of Sand is no exception.
Thank you NetGalley, the author and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC in exchange for an honest book review.

From the first 10%, I’ve found there’s seemingly no plot, but it meanders along at a comfortable speed and it just brings the reader with it. It feels like a very niche book, but as we are located in Florida, a lot of the humor should be especially relevant. It should go over well with our patrons. Should be an easy 4-5 stars for the right readers.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC.

So, been thinking about this book for several days.
Extremely well written,and though a novel, essentially a series of short stories.
The narrator is nameless and the setting is Northern Florida, a region I am well acquainted with.
He is gay, childless, late middle aged but still sexually active,but loneliness, and his fear of becoming ill and dying alone,are his overwhelming fears and the central themes recurring throughout the book.
His lone friend in town-Earl- another gay man 20 years older are not sexually involved but share a love of books and movies.
In vivid and all too realistic fashion he takes us through Earl’s inevitable decline and ultimate demise.
At times funny-when he gets skin cancers he is astonished “ after all the broccoli I’ve eaten”, and “ who do I call when I need to go for a colonoscopy”-but overall achingly sad-both in terms of the decline in the community, the decline in the house he lives in( his dead parents house, and his own life.
There are innumerable references to how other famous people faced the end(Tolstoy and Chekhov, for example) but I was reminded of a quote from Schopenhauer” at the end all of us are and remain alone”.
Ive thought and rethought the final chapter, dealing with the clerk and the pharmacist in the Wahlgreens and his attraction to them. My interpretation: life is precious and short, so make the most of it.

I absolutely loved this book. I must have highlighted a dozen sentences or paragraphs about aging that I want to remember. Holleran captures shat it's like to age and eventually pass away as a solitary human being as well as anyone I've ever read. Kudos.

Reminiscent of Philip Roth’s later novels, Kingdom of Sand, is certainly bleak, but so honest and darkly comic, full of sharp observations about growing old, and loneliness, and that lingering lust for the young that endures. Holleran has been for decades a writer of immense talent. (And he fucking nails Florida).