We lose track of where we are in time, which results in disorienting contradictions and ambiguities ... Avoidance of narrative tension comes to seem laborious, particularly when the elements of a compelling plot rise into view ... There are the makings here of a melodrama like the ones that Earl and the narrator enjoy watching. But these elements remain inert. Narrative is ordinarily created by the disruption of a status quo; Holleran seems to want a novel that is all status quo, no disruption. We are left with what he has called, in an essay, 'the actual dull reality of life' ... Holleran is unusually frank about the continuing toll of queer shame, even in a liberated age ... Even as I value Holleran’s candor, and his refusal of triumphalist narratives of queer affirmation—sometimes it doesn’t get better, or not for everyone—these moments are painful to read.
In this melancholy world that Holleran creates with such stoic accuracy and sad acceptance, nothing happens — except that time passes. This, really, is Holleran’s great subject. He is interested in the rhythms of days and the rhythms of the natural world around him and the texture of what gets lost with the years ... The isolation, the long solitary walks taken, allow the writer to look outward, to examine the changing day closely and meticulously, to study a close-knit world, thus building up a complete picture not only of the surroundings but of how time moves in a single place ... Holleran is witty at times, and aphoristic ... His new novel is all the more affecting and engaging because the images of isolation and old age here are haunted — or seem more honest and serious — because in 1978 Holleran wrote the quintessential novel about gay abandon, the sheer, careless pleasure of it: Dancer From the Dance. Now, at almost 80 years of age, he has produced a novel remarkable for its integrity, for its readiness to embrace difficult truths and for its complex way of paying homage to the passing of time.
A nonlinear, episodic novel focused on the transient nature of life could have been depressing, but Holleran’s thoughtful, poetic treatment makes this material deeply moving and an important contribution to the literature of mortality. It’s one of the most beautiful novels of the year ... The novel gains considerable power from its recognition that no attempt at immortality, whether through art or other means, guarantees success ... not for readers interested in lighthearted fare, but it’s a stunning meditation on what happens, as the narrator says, 'when old age gets its claws in you.' Around the same time he cites Ruskin, the narrator reads a book on dying that offers sobering advice: Live a good life, because you’re not going to have much control over your ending. This exquisite novel offers similar counsel: The final destination may be grim, but with luck and a good set of directions, one can at least enjoy the ride.
... quiet resolve, an exquisite eye for observation and (on the debit side) a slight habit of repetition ... There is a strange and urgent life force in The Kingdom of Sand, deriving from its delight in faithful description, that is inseparable from its inherent melancholy. And though it requires a little more patience than other books by Mr. Holleran, it builds to an amazing emotional pitch. The final chapter is either the saddest thing this author has ever written or the most subversively joyful—no small accomplishment whatever the case.
... gloriously death-obsessed ... It is bracingly necromaniac, but Holleran has a puckishly morbid sense of humour ... As well as flashes of humour, Holleran, who will be 80 next year, is a keen-eyed observer...The result is a touching, honest, unafraid, almost uplifting exploration of ageing.
Out of this obstinate ennui, Holleran renders an elegiac and very funny contemplation of not just ageing but an age ... Holleran is a perspicacious writer of place, and of mundanity; the first pages detail how the construction of two freeways and an overpass have made a cruisey video store on Highway 301 inconvenient ... Holleran – or is it his narrator? – is erudite yet often repetitive; the uncontested colonisation of Earl’s spare bathroom by dying cockroaches is one topic brought up incessantly. But eternal recurrence doesn’t dim Holleran’s incandescence. The rambling is tonal ... a small-scale study of America at twilight.
Observing decline and death seem to be the book’s raison d’etre...Holleran has lost none of his acute, penetrating vision ... My first reading of The Kingdom of Sand left me frustrated and sad. Frustrated because I had hoped that after 16 years Holleran had somehow transcended the world of his three previous novels and ceased to rehearse his favorite obsessions...But rereading—this time looking at the trees, not the forest—I had to own up to my sensitivity to the author’s decline and mortality...From a second read, I once again fell in love with his forthright prose, unfailingly honest but frequently touching and tender—and frequently razor-sharp.
... feel[s] like a summation of Holleran’s work, circling tighter than ever around matters of desire and mortality ... The tension in the two men’s 'shared loneliness together' has little to do with plot — it’s clear from the start that everybody is headed in one direction, underground. Rather, the suspense is over how — and whether — the narrator is going to confront his and Earl’s mortality ... isn’t persistently mordant, but its humor is inevitably of the black-comic sort ... It’s rare to find fiction that takes this kind of dying of the light as its subject and doesn’t make its heroes feel either pathetic or polished with a gleam of false dignity ... Aging, frailty and death are universal themes. But Holleran also understands them as particular to a culture trained on (as the title of his 1995 novel put it) the beauty of men ... This sad, beautiful book captures the sensations Holleran’s characters are chasing — as well as the darkness that inevitably comes for them, and us.
Here is a book that claims to be a novel but doesn’t tell a story. Instead, it spends several hundred pages — often filled with less-than-smooth writing — ruminating about gay life in northern Florida...His narrative is so detailed and specific about the region that I came away persuaded everything he was describing was real ... Because there is no story, its principal value may be the profound insights it offers into the lives of a very specific population: aging gay men in Florida. That’s not a subject of great interest to me, but perhaps it will be to others.
Don’t think for a minute that any of this is dull; thanks to Holleran’s brilliant gift for characterization, the narrator and Earl come alive on the page, commanding readers’ attention to what is a splendid, remarkably good book.
This moody meditation on loneliness and aging offers a picture of a life not lived to the fullest. Read it for the North Florida atmosphere and for the affecting portrait of a friendship.
Majestic and wistful ... Though the novel is permeated by a mournful depression, Holleran brings stylistic flourishes and mordant nostalgia to the proceedings, and fully develops the narrator, who floats elegantly on his distilled memories and eventually lands on a beautiful resolution. This vital work shows Holleran at the top of his game.
Mordant, unflinching ... Holleran makes these everyday topics, and the seemingly uneventful days of the narrator and his friends, into thrilling fiction. That is partly because this novel feels confessional, with the narrator divulging thoughts and behavior that most of us would be afraid to share. Holleran is fiercely a pointillist. His observations about the minute details of his narrator’s life feel revelatory ... Ostensibly about gay men getting older and being alone, this novel is really about everyone getting older and being alone.
