dukegregory 's review for:

Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran

1.5

---

Deadeningly pleonastically redundant. A great example of a work that can shake someone's world if they've never been exposed to such a focused depiction of the gay underground. This operates best as a soulful, theatrical historical record of pre-AIDS New York City, but, even then, so what if you could open this text to any page and find that it basically functions as a thirty page loop until the ending. The tone is static. The characters are static. The novel is static, which goes against the kinetic energy you see Holleran trying to embody. It's telling that many positive reviews on Goodreads feel the need to say that THIS IS A POST-STONEWALL PRE-AIDS CLASSIC OF GAY LITERATURE, as if that ubiquitous recognition means they must indeed love the book on those terms: influence and import. Sometimes, pioneers deserve to be thought of as bound to a "proto" prefixing rather than viewed as the earliest embodiment of perfection.