"For the fact was drugs were not necessary to most of us, because the music, youth, sweaty bodies were enough...We lived for music, we lived for Beauty, and we were poor. But we didn’t care where we were living, or what we had to do during the day to make it possible; eventually, if you waited long enough, you were finally standing before the mirror in that cheap room, looking at your face one last time, like an actor going onstage, before rushing out to walk in the door of that discotheque and see someone like Malone."
Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance is a story of gay culture in 1970s New York, an engaging satire and one of the most popular works of gay fiction of its time.
The story is non-linear and epistolary in parts, framed by letters at the beginning and end of the novel. The key characters are Malone, an enigmatic ex-lawyer searching for love and happiness, and Sutherland, a vivacious drag queen. The story is never told from the point of view of Sutherland or Malone. Instead, their story is told through letters between their friends and an unknown narrator who moved in the same circles. The structure creates a distance between the reader, Malone and Sutherland: "I thought Malone was the handsomest man I'd ever seen. But then I was in love with half those people, and I never said hello or good-bye to any of them." The anonymous narrator furthers the dreamlike quality to the narrative. Malone becomes as elusive to the reader as he is to those around him and the reader in turn becomes one of the dancers, occupying the deserted warehouses, shadowy parks and streets of late night New York City.
Dancer has an air of timelessness, decadence and idealism akin to novels like The Great Gatsby which came before it (a comparison which has been drawn by many critics and peers). It is rich with descriptions of gay life in the seventies, written and set in a pre-AIDS era, in New York City. It seeks to capture in lyrical and often poetic language, the hedonism of the New York gay party circuit - from the Lower East Side to Fire Island: "They lived only to bathe in the music, and each other's desire, in a strange democracy whose only ticket of admission was physical beauty..." In that sense Dancer is both timeless and not - just as Gatsby evokes powerful images of the Jazz Age, Dancer's readers immerse themselves completely with the disco dancers of 1970s New York, suspended in time in the Twelfth Floor club and a post-liberation haze. With liberation, there is isolation. After summer, Fire Island is isolated and the memories of the previous summers and Puerto Rican boys washed away with the footprints in the sand. There's a transience to the movement of the characters from place to place and the novel evokes the idea of the city as the urban closet of 1970s America.
Holleran has alluded in interviews to the style of Dancer as being an "exercise in camp". His narrative was inspired by his own experiences receiving letters from friends in the days before text messages and email, and reading columns by drag queens in literature given away in the gay bars he frequented. He adopted the same style for the opening letters: "The greatest drug of all, my dear, was not one of those pills in so many colors that you took over the years, was not the opium, the hash you smoked in houses at the beach, or the speed or smack you shot up in Sutherland's apartment, no, it wasn't any of these. It was the city, darling, it was the city, the city itself..."
Holleran has also spoken with hindsight of the romanticism of youth which drove the novel, and this youthfulness and romanticism is present in the lavish, sensuous descriptions of a time of idyllic excitement and new experience: "...especially the young ones, come into the canyon for the first time, quiet as deer, some of them, coming to your hand for salt: their dark eyes wide and gleaming with the wonder and the fear we had all felt at seeing for the first time life as our dreams had always imagined it...". Yet the disco dancing and the laughs along the way juxtapose with a persistent sense of loneliness and melancholy which resonates throughout Dancer. There's a preoccupation with death and Holleran casts his dancers as "doomed queens."
Holleran writes of the era with realism in assured, lyrical prose. By the end of the novel, there remain questions without answers and the enigmatic Malone is as elusive as ever he was: "That was Malone - standing in the crush of voluptuous limbs, enthralled by the cold, lonely, deserted street." Dancer is a sumptuous treat of a novel, and one which has made a significant contribution to the body of post-Stonewall LGBT fiction. Even if you have never been to Fire Island or set foot in New York City, this story is so full of life and charm, it brings its locations to life for the uninitiated. In the words of the New York magazine: "...We have never been to Fire Island and we have never lived on the Lower East Side, but we have looked for love, and we are growing older, and this book is the story of our life." [qtd. 2001 Perennial ed. of Dancer From the Dance]
Highly recommended.
Dancer has an air of timelessness, decadence and idealism akin to novels like The Great Gatsby which came before it (a comparison which has been drawn by many critics and peers). It is rich with descriptions of gay life in the seventies, written and set in a pre-AIDS era, in New York City. It seeks to capture in lyrical and often poetic language, the hedonism of the New York gay party circuit - from the Lower East Side to Fire Island: "They lived only to bathe in the music, and each other's desire, in a strange democracy whose only ticket of admission was physical beauty..." In that sense Dancer is both timeless and not - just as Gatsby evokes powerful images of the Jazz Age, Dancer's readers immerse themselves completely with the disco dancers of 1970s New York, suspended in time in the Twelfth Floor club and a post-liberation haze. With liberation, there is isolation. After summer, Fire Island is isolated and the memories of the previous summers and Puerto Rican boys washed away with the footprints in the sand. There's a transience to the movement of the characters from place to place and the novel evokes the idea of the city as the urban closet of 1970s America.
Holleran has alluded in interviews to the style of Dancer as being an "exercise in camp". His narrative was inspired by his own experiences receiving letters from friends in the days before text messages and email, and reading columns by drag queens in literature given away in the gay bars he frequented. He adopted the same style for the opening letters: "The greatest drug of all, my dear, was not one of those pills in so many colors that you took over the years, was not the opium, the hash you smoked in houses at the beach, or the speed or smack you shot up in Sutherland's apartment, no, it wasn't any of these. It was the city, darling, it was the city, the city itself..."
Holleran has also spoken with hindsight of the romanticism of youth which drove the novel, and this youthfulness and romanticism is present in the lavish, sensuous descriptions of a time of idyllic excitement and new experience: "...especially the young ones, come into the canyon for the first time, quiet as deer, some of them, coming to your hand for salt: their dark eyes wide and gleaming with the wonder and the fear we had all felt at seeing for the first time life as our dreams had always imagined it...". Yet the disco dancing and the laughs along the way juxtapose with a persistent sense of loneliness and melancholy which resonates throughout Dancer. There's a preoccupation with death and Holleran casts his dancers as "doomed queens."
Holleran writes of the era with realism in assured, lyrical prose. By the end of the novel, there remain questions without answers and the enigmatic Malone is as elusive as ever he was: "That was Malone - standing in the crush of voluptuous limbs, enthralled by the cold, lonely, deserted street." Dancer is a sumptuous treat of a novel, and one which has made a significant contribution to the body of post-Stonewall LGBT fiction. Even if you have never been to Fire Island or set foot in New York City, this story is so full of life and charm, it brings its locations to life for the uninitiated. In the words of the New York magazine: "...We have never been to Fire Island and we have never lived on the Lower East Side, but we have looked for love, and we are growing older, and this book is the story of our life." [qtd. 2001 Perennial ed. of Dancer From the Dance]
Highly recommended.