Gatsby in Drag

WITHOUT MARX OR JESUS, there's still lust; erotic desire galvanizes the nightmarish sweatglistening discotheque and toilet-stall world of Andrew Holleran's first novel. The title, of course, comes from Yeats' "Among School Children," as does the epigram, and the book emerges from Yeats, admixed with desire: desire, the force of the gyre spinning Malone and Sutherland and their coterie, binding them to the center till it scatters them like a merry-go round gone haywire; desire, the lesser mythology in the absence of religion, that turns the X's on a suicide note from crosses to kisses, and a night at Les Mouches to the Beatific Vision; desire, that which makes them dance.

"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.

These dancers, you see, are gay. It seems overmuch has been made of this--the book is about passion first, and gay passion afterwards.

And the dancers are by no means the mainstream homosexual world; as Holleran writes,

After all, most fags are as boring as straight people--they start businesses with lovers and end up in Hollywood, Florida, with dogs and doubleknit slacks and I have no desire to write about them... But the failures--that tiny subspecies of homosexuals, the doomed queen... That fascinates me! The fags who consider themselves worthless because they are queer.

They are the high priests of libido--Malone is gloriously handsome, haunted by a vision of 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:

'Does love mean never having to say you're sorry,' he said, dabbing his upper chest with a bit of perfume, 'or too sore to get fucked again?'

They whirl around the discotheques, the baths, and the men's room at Grand Central Station, with their clear plastic belts and work boots and Technicolor T-shirts, till Sutherland overdoses and Malone disappears into Long Island Sound. Passion is a cancer; eros and thanatos, interwoven.

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

The neighborhood was now the perfect counterpart of his inner state: Its filth and ugliness corresponded to his lust.

The reader should be left to make his own correlations; as the rule goes, "Show, don't tell." The style is occasionally marred by obtrusive Latinate words, self-concious allusions, and a few impossible blunders:

He waited till very late at night, when most everyone was asleep, like little children who have just had a glass of milk, only it wasn't milk, it was another fluid.

But few 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.