The Kingdom of Sand (4*)

Andrew Holleran's sneak preview of something most people deny is not for the faint of heart, that's for sure.  

Old age was like the tray hanging from the neck of a cigarette girl in one of those thirties movies Earl and I liked, I thought, a beautiful blonde who comes to your table in the nightclub, sweeps her arms across the tray, and asks if you’d like cigars or cigarettes—though in this case it was, “Arthritis? Spinal stenosis? Hearing loss? Diabetes? Parkinson’s? Alzheimer’s?  Stroke?  ALS?  Dementia?  Breast cancer?  Congestive heart failure?  Macular degeneration?  Or a brain tumor?”

I can't recall a bleaker novel since 1996, when Holleran explored a gay man's middle age--presumably his own--set in the same small north Florida town.  His sensibility--apparently shaped by rejection, or fear of it--hasn't mellowed but he's now at the junction where even cruising at the local boat ramp is a thing of the past.

If aesthetic standards are the foundation of your sexual requirements, I learned, you have restricted yourself to a very small portion of the human race. 

By the same token, it's as if he's been reading my mind all along.

The expressions on the customers’ faces were all so blank one could only explain them with old age and weariness, unless it was the experience of having been rejected countless times.  Everyone looked like a dog in  a pound hoping to be taken home, but with none of the eagerness dogs exhibit in that situation.  No barking, wagging of tails, no jumping up against a wire partition—instead a face from which all emotion, even longing, had been removed.

Like many gay men without children, Holleran also looks more to the past than the future.

It seems astonishing to me how much I was not told about my father’s past, as if it was none of my business, or irrelevant to my life.  But then that is the fate of children—they are brought onstage in the middle of an opera whose libretto they have never reading whose language they don’t even know. 

Lyrical writing helped me swallow The Kingdom of Sand, which aches with the loneliness of self-imposed exile.  It joins Should We Stay or Should We Go in artistically affirming my desire to check out of the world of the living sooner rather than later.

Read it at your own peril