Word: holleran
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...That is all that's left when love is gone. Dancing...There is no love in this city...only discotheques." Dancing becomes the central motif of Holleran's book and his characters' lives, the all-important Yeatsian ceremony, the substitute liturgy. They dance at the Twelfth Floor of the Carlisle and in the Garment Center after hours and in Hackensack; they live for love, make careers of it, die from it. Like dervishes, they dance for God; but God is Frank Post's pectorals...
...dancers are by no means the mainstream homosexual world; as Holleran writes...
...ideal love unattainable in a sterile, superficial homosexual world, Gatsby in drag; Sutherland, a Quentin Crisp, queer before it became chic, is doomed by his undersized member, a homosexual leper. With his speed and Quaaludes, his chiffons and Estee Lauder and bridge games and Egyptian groupies, Sutherland is Holleran's one truly brilliant creation. Sutherland provides much of the bitchy humor that makes Dancer, if nothing else, one of the funnier books of the year...
DANCER COMES REPLETE with the usual flaws of a first novel. Holleran is at all times too obvious; similies dominate metaphors; he tells too much. For example, he writes...
...first novels are flawless, and fewer still have achieved what Holleran has with Dancer. His vision is often engrossing, his dialogue always sharp, his Sutherland wonderfully memorable. Holleran takes us into a world most of us will never see, and makes it real--an old-fashioned praise, but still a valid one. Now he faces that most difficult of enterprises for an American novelist--surviving his success...