The Kingdom of Sand by Andrew Holleran

After I read Dancer From the Dance a few months ago and posted my diary entry, a friend suggested I read another of Holleran’s books: Grief, from 2007. The library didn’t have a copy of Grief on the shelf, but they did have a couple of copies of his latest book, The Kingdom of Sand, from just last year, so I read that.

Unfortunately, I found The Kingdom of Sand praiseworthy and flawed in the same way as Dancer From the Dance. Holleran’s writing is gorgeous; that’s the good part. But the characters, twenty-something and frivolous in Dancer from the Dance, and seventy-something and morbid in The Kingdom of Sand, trap themselves in self-made tragedies they recognize but refuse to free themselves from. The result is another sad and frustrating read.

Having now read Holleran’s latest novel and first novel it’s more clear that he’s writing fictionalized memoir. Like Holleran, the narrator was born in the mid-west but grew up in the Caribbean when his parents moved. He then lived in New York and Washington DC, while the parents bought a retirement home in Florida. The Kingdom of Sand finds the narrator living in the house in rural Florida he inherited after his parents died. Gainesville is the big city half an hour to the west.

The short Chapter One, “The Dirty Hat”, opens with the narrator cruising at a porno-video store on his way home from a visit to Gainesville. It’s as sordid and depressing as you imagine. The other scene in this chapter is a lunch with two gay friends, Patrick and Luke, talking about family and aging and gossiping about another gay friend. The dirty hat of the chapter title belongs to the narrator and is a symbol of his shame in growing old.

In the even shorter Chapter Two, titled “The Endless Cantaloupe”, the narrator describes the final illnesses and deaths of his parents and in particular, their eating habits as they declined. The cantaloupe is the narrator’s own diet decision, chosen for the melon’s supposed health benefits, though it bores him.

The longer Chapter Three, titled “The Kingdom of Sand”, describes the narrator’s earlier visits to Florida, when his parents were alive and he still lived elsewhere.

The very long Chapter Four, “Hurricane Weather” takes up 164 pages, nearly two thirds of the book, a novella in the midst of short stories. The subject is Earl, an older, single, gay man, a friend of the narrator. Earl loves music and old movies and invites the narrator to his house to enjoy them together. Earl gradually declines. He hires a handy-man, a married straight man, who works around the house and slowly becomes an indispensable caretaker. Earl gives away his possessions. When he finally dies, he leaves the house to the handy-man.

A final short chapter is titled, “Two Loves Have I at Walgreen’s”. The narrator is alone and lonely. He’s smitten by one of the young clerks at Walgreen’s and the pharmacist. The narrator carefully times his vaccinations for the degree of intimacy it allows him with the pharmacist.

The stories are connected by meditations on loneliness and aging. That every story shares a connection to Christmas, for some reason, either Christmas decorations, or invitations to spend the holiday with family, creates another tie. The narrator’s life is circumspect to begin with and as the novel progresses the circle closes ever smaller and smaller. He ceases to travel. His friends die, or he stops seeing the living ones. He grows more isolated in his house. He watches porn on his computer.

It’s pathetic but unnecessarily so. This is an intelligent man, well-read; he mentions Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the first two pages. There’s no need for a man of his creativity and resources to spend his life isolated and bored. So the narrow life is clearly a preference, and I grew uninterested in him. I want a character as a companion, and an author as a guide, who is more courageous and self-actualizing. I finished the novel more than a month ago and took until now to write this diary entry because I found so little of interest in the novel to write about. The novel is merely a gradual darkening and decline. It feels like 50 years after Stonewall, Holleran and his narrator are still living in a closet, mooning about the straight man at the pharmacy and watching porn at home, but now a closet constructed of his own anixieties. Holleran’s gorgeous prose deserves better.