Book Review: The Beauty of Men (Andrew Holleran)

As I’ve read The Beauty of Men over the past several months, I’ve been reading sections at our South Bay Writers Open Mic and commenting that “this book ought to be horribly depressing; but it’s so beautifully written that I keep reading.”
 

True—although it did take me awhile to finish.  I realized, after I got about halfway, that “nothing was happening.”  That’s a cliché, of course.  Peeved readers love to complain about how “nothing happens” in books like Kerouac’s On The Road.  But it seems to me, if writers are supposed to “show not tell,” then it isn’t a question of whether something “happens” or not.  It’s a question of whether the reader is being given an experience.  

I felt I was experiencing something in Holleran’s book.  With him, I always feel I’m experiencing something.  I may or may not like it—but that’s a separate question.

Lark, the protagonist in The Beauty of Men, has moved to Florida to care for his quadriplegic mother.  Behind him lies New York and the gay life of the late 1970s (portrayed in Holleran’s book Dancer from the Dance).

We share the experience of visiting the nursing home, and imagine what it must be like for his mother to have spent the last twelve years there.  And we experience what it is like for Lark to make his regular visits and to live now in Florida, after his endless partying in New York and the onset of the AIDS epidemic.  We’re carried back to those earlier times and we experience the deepening epidemic, which leads one to believe that “everyone is dying.”

Yet life goes on.  Lark hangs out by a boat ramp at an out-of-the-way lake, hoping to pick up men.  He does—and falls in love with a man who after one night refuses to have anything more to do with him.  Lark pines, Lark drives past the man’s home.  This goes on for a year.  Finally—around page 200 (spoiler!)—the man confronts him.

I love Holleran’s writing style.  This is what keeps me reading.  If you can read this without becoming depressed—and without insisting that something “happens,” this might be a good book for you.