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A pensive, creative, and haunting novel that speaks expressly to the heart without sentimentality, by the author of Dancer from the Dance (1978), an important novel from the 1970s-'80s gay-lit renaissance. The title of Holleran's new novel states its theme. He offers the story of a middle-aged gay man heading to Washington, D.C., to live and teach for a short term, to get away from his hometown after his mother's death. He takes a room in an elegant townhouse owned by another middle-aged gay man, who is slowly and quietly grieving over the loss of youthful energy, attractiveness, and prowess. While living in Washington and commiserating with his landlord and the friend they have in common over the loss of lives the tsunami of AIDS caused in the '80s, he rather accidentally picks up a volume containing the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln, and he is taken by her grief and sense of displacement after her husband's death and ends up reading every page. His plan, however, especially in coming to Washington, is to start life over again, which Mrs. Lincoln was never able to do--her grief and loneliness became a deep well from which she couldn't escape. Holleran's "message"--that grief is never avoidable for any of us--is so sensitively rendered that it never impedes the swift development of the story line. - from Booklist (ALA)… (more)
User reviews
I was very much engaged with this book, and found the use of Mrs. Lincoln as a foil for the narrator intriguing, particularly as I had recently visited the Lincoln Museum in Springfield (IL) and learned much about her that I had not known. It led me to agree with the narrator's landlord, as he describes a scene between Mrs. Lincoln and former Secretary of State William Seward. They meet on a train and he brings her a cup of tea, which she tosses out the window, "tucking her head down and shedding bitter tears”. “What a scene in a movie that would make!” said my landlord. He gazed into the garden. “Why has no one written an opera on this woman?" Good question!
This quote struck me: “What is better than reading in the same room or same house with someone at night? Reading is an activity both communal and seaparate. The lighted lamps, the quiet, the knowledge that my landlord was downstairs, all made me happy: the two of us seemed to constitute a household then; that home for which everone is looking. In truth, of course, I felt my status as a boarder all the more keenly at such moments.” It contrasts with a similar image used by Paul Monette in his poem, "The House on King's Road":
the wall of books laid brick by brick the lamp
pooling on the blue-bound Plato as we held
our ground through August let the material go
what you cannot buy or have in your name
is the ghost of a touch the glancing stroke
as a man passes through a room where his love
sits reading later much later the nodding head
of the one on the other's shoulder no title
usurps that place this is its home forever
And another definition of home described in the book: “When Nureyev went back to Russia, he said, he was accosted by an old woman who asked him, “Where is home for you?” And Nureyev said, “Home? What is home?” And the babushka replied: “Where someone waits for you.”
I have shared experiences similar to this one: “Class was strange, I told him -- walking back I felt so drained by the seminar on Literature and AIDS, all I wanted to do was get home and lie down. The reason I said was this: That I was in a room once a week at a long table talking about something that for these students was simply a historical event being studied in a seminar made me recall, as I led the discussion, all the people who were no longer alive. Here I am, I frequently thought, sitting in a seminar in Washington, D.C., twenty years later, discussing as a historical event the thing that killed my friends.”
I do urge you to read this one.
I picked it up as a "quick read". It's only 150 pages, and I was on a trip and finished my other book, so thought this would be a filler until I got back to my stack of TBRs. This quick read has taken me nearly a month to finish. I couldn't
In hindsight, I don't know what I didn't like. The writing was very good, the setting and descriptions of life in Washington, DC were entertaining, and the concept of the book - how individuals handle grief was intriguing. It just didn't tie together.
There were snippets I really enjoyed, and the introduction of Mary Todd Lincoln's letters and how she dealt with grief was an exceptional literary tool to juxtapose the characters' contemporary situations against her historical experience.
And it wasn't a bad book. It just got to a point where I didn't care. Maybe my expectations were off - I thought it was about how they would "deal with" grief - not just exist in it - that the lack of progress for the main character just bored me.