Dancer from the Dance

by Andrew Holleran and Andrew Hollerman

Book Overview

An astonishingly beautiful book. The best gay novel written by anyone of our generation. -- Harper's magazine

One of the most important works of gay literature, this haunting, brilliant novel is a seriocomic remembrance of things past -- and still poignantly present. It depicts the adventures of Malone, a beautiful young man searching for love amid New York's emerging gay scene. From Manhattan's Everard Baths and after-hours...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060937068
• ISBN13: 9780060937065
• Release Date: December 2001
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

I read it anyway

Shocking and desperate, clever and biting...it can be hard to read and painful to get through. There is a rhythm to the banter as it goes on and on and on and on about the sorted details of each and every event and person like a book from the old testament. If you're into social details and banter and chatter you'll enjoy these tirades. Raw, nothing delicate about it. The letters were clever as the names changed with the tone and mood of each.

If I Only Had One Book to Take to A Heterosexual Desert...

...it would be Andrew Holleran's beautiful, wickedly funny, decadent freshman novel, "Dancer from the Dance". The appelation has been given to many books, but "Dancer" is for me the all-time greatest gay novel. While a plot-and-character summary would make it sound like a narrowly focused, thinly disguised documentary of gay hedonism in pre-AIDS New York City, "Dancer"'s images and dialogue are uniquely evocative and memorable. Holleran's prose has a rare expressive quality, and his descriptions truly haunt the reader. Guiding the reader through the wreckage and beauty of 1970s New York are two brilliant characters, Malone and Sutherland. Malone is a fallen Adonis, a well-bred WASP young man who, after a moment of unexpected passion in his Manhattan office late one night, begins gorging himself on the overripe fruit of the city's sexual life. After his first romantic disaster, Malone is rescued, taken in, and mentored by the bitchy, high-camp, mad-genius Sutherland. As they careen between raunch and glamour, Sutherland dispenses Wildean aphorisms on life, love, and sex. While every step of the way serving as Sutherland's accomplice in drugs, dishing, discos, and designer demimondes, Malone the whore retains an all-Middle-American vision of finding true love. Truly, Malone and Sutherland are two of 20th-century literature's most memorable protagonists. But it is Holleran's unparalleled ability to evoke lasting images of New York City during a halcyon period for gay men that makes "Dancer" an unforgettable and absolutely necessary read. If you're gay and have a pulse, read this book.I've read "Dancer" at least a dozen times and it never fails to provoke both laughter and tears.

Universal Truths

I've had the privilege of chairing several literary-discussion groups that dealt with "Dancer from the Dance," one with all gay men, another with gay men and lesbians, a third with straight women. Everybody liked the book, but it means different things to different people. For the generation of gay men born between about 1940 and 1955, it is the story of their life, the pain of coming out and the lyricism of finding that first love as an adult. For younger gay men and lesbians it is partly a period piece but the emotional impact still holds true, as it does for the straight readers. The novel about the misunderstood, middle-class gay boy who grows up absurd, sublimates himself in a career, and then comes out with a bang in his mid-twenties is a cliche among gay American fiction, but I can think of no books that do it as well as "Dancer from the Dance." To know this book is to love it.

The Gay Gatsby

It seems kind of silly to try to measure, as if it were a science, the precise extent to which a work is a "classic," as many have done here. This is especially true when the work in question is only some 20 years old and the culture producing its critics is both notoriously bitchy and given to dissent. Having said that, far be it from me to hold myself aloof from the fray. Because for all the debate and qualification and feelings of guilt by association this novel seems sometimes to provoke in its readers, it's a classic. There, I've said it--the "c" word. If this book is not in print fifty years from now, we'll have lost what is for late 20th century American gay culture a canonical novel that is, in its own way, every bit as evocative and compelling as the works of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. (The comparison to Fitzgerald is in fact an apt one: this novel resonates with subtle references and allusions to The Great Gatsby--which, fifty years earlier, also documented great big parties frequented by plenty of lost souls on Long Island Sound. I think Holleran very much had Gatsby on his mind when he wrote this novel, and, to his great credit, this story warrants and benefits from the comparison.) Dancer captures a time and a place and a mood, and it does so with poetry and while telling a hell of a funny, debauched, and crushingly sad, story. Malone and Sutherland are both archetypes and real people, they are Huck and Jim in gay Manhattan, and we care deeply about them. We look forward to seeing what Sutherland will have to say next and to finding out how the beautiful and damned Malone--that über circuit queen--can screw up his life any further. Holleran's Malone and Sutherland are misguided, exaggerated and decadent, and frequently horrible moral role models. And they are all too human. Let me say this: I personally stopped all of my circuit-like behavior two years ago. I'm 37 and, as many of us know, that's ancient for a gay man. It was unseemly to keep doing what I was doing--something that Sutherland would have understood, even if he wouldn't necessarily have let his age stop him. Dancer from the Dance helped me put closure on that period of my life, my youth, and to do so with grace and a wistful smile and, yes, profound sadness. I don't have the option of getting lost in Long Island Sound. Instead, I did what Nick did at the end of Gatsby: I returned to my Midwestern roots. Knowing that Sutherland and Malone managed to escape that retreat somehow makes my own plight seem less mundane. Dancer From the Dance is a great book with all the hallmarks of a lasting work of literature--and time will have to prove me right on that.

Still Relevant, 20 Years Later

I'd heard about Dancer from the Dance almost from the moment of my coming out. For 19 years I resisted; there just isn't much gay-themed literature that's any good. Dancer is the glorious exception. Beautifully written, and as relevant to the gay-male experience today as it was in the late 70s. More fascinating than the novel's central figure -- Malone, every man's favorite circuit boy -- is the nameless narrator, whom we scarcely come to know. This was an inspired device by Holleran, who recognizes the prospect that any one of us might lose our own identities in the pursuit and adoration of the beautiful Malones.

One of the best gay novels yet published!

Often cited as "the" gay novel of the post-Stonewall generation, "Dancer From the Dance" is a lyrical account of the frenetic life of gay men caught up in the hard-partying "circuit" of Manhattan and Fire Island in the mid-1970's. Hollaran's enigmatic protagonist, Anthony Malone, is a man of nearly unearthly masculine beauty who has left his unloved profession as a lawyer to pursue a life of lust and pleasure in his personal, endless search for love. Poetic, and often moving, the novel paints a colorful picture of a pack of driven hedonists, endlessly in quest of "the perfect man", moving through discos, bars, bathhouses, and parties of almost baroque proportions. The book is levened with comic moments, largely supplied by Sutherland, Malone's outrageous, advice spewing friend, mentor and den mother, who moves effortlessly between the heady worlds of the heterosexual jet set and the gay demimonde. Malone's wistful longing to recapture his one successful male-to-male relationship with the married, violent Frankie is hauntingly described. Overall, a very satisfying novel, vivid and vital despite the passivity of Malone. And the equivocal ending stays with one. Holleran's subsequent books have not been nearly as satisfying, but so profound an impact did "Dancer From the Dance" make on the gay community that, for years after its publication in 1977, anonymous graffiti appeared throughout New York's Greenwich Village, plaintively proclaiming: "Malone Lives!" Read it and see!