Reading Holleran, Again

Just finished reading Andrew Holleran’s short novel (or is it a novella??) Grief.  I believe this is the third time I’ve read this book.  My first time was probably less than two years ago.  Clearly, I like this book.

 

But I continue to ask myself why I like it.  I don’t mean this is any unkind way.  Sometimes I like things in spite of strong annoyance about certain aspects of the work in question, things that simply antagonize me somehow.  The issue with Grief is nothing like that.  It’s a more technical writing issue.  I could almost feel it was my own flaw, and fault myself rather than the book; and maybe that is the truth.

I suppose the main uneasiness I feel is about the nature of this book itself.  What is it?  Is it a novel?  And does that even matter?

Generally, fiction is called a “novel” if it runs over 50,000 words—about 200 pages.  Grief comes in at 150.  I don’t have the statistics on other famous works of fiction, but I suspect quite a few famous “novels” come in under 50,000 words.  The Great Gatsby, in the editions I’ve seen, comes in slightly under 200 pages.

A novel often involves a fairly large cast of characters.  A Passage to India introduces around twenty characters just in the second chapter!  Yet something like The Stranger or The Immoralist contains a minimal number.  Indeed, Andre Gide, after writing multiple long works of fiction, called The Counterfeiters his “first novel.”  And Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his “first novel,” when he had already written War and Peace!  He didn’t know what to call War and Peace!

And I’m not sure what to call Grief.  But it’s beautifully written, and I enjoy reading and rereading it.  It’s a long monologue, involving the narrator and a few characters (fewer than ten, I’d say), as the narrator teaches a class at a Washington D.C. university and tries to get over his mother’s death.  Meanwhile he muses on his own life—that of an unattached, aging gay man at the end of the twentieth century—and the life of various famous Americans (Mary Tood Lincoln, Henry Adams) who were devastated by the deaths of loved ones; and his own friends who have been lost to AIDS.

Novels generally involve a plot.  I can’t put my fingers on a plot in Grief.  The narrator arrives in Washington, meets his landlord, walks around the city, reads about Lincoln and Adams, visits the mother of a friend who died of AIDS, discusses homosexuality and AIDS with students, finishes teaching, returns home.  Does this constitute a plot?  Do I care?

Frankly, I don’t.  I don’t care if this book runs “only” 150 pages.  I don’t care if the cast of characters is minimal.  I don’t care if not very much “happens.”

I love the mood of the book; I love the writing; I love the thoughtfulness.  Perhaps because I used to live relatively close to DC?  Perhaps because I’m a thoughtful, sometimes moody, person, who cares about relationships to family and friends and lovers?

I enjoy it; not everyone will.  Some people enjoy genre fiction; I enjoy this.  Whatever.