Unlike Andrew Holleran’s previous beautiful, vital fictions gracing gay men’s stories over the decades — Nights in Aruba, The Beauty of Men, Dancer from the Dance — Kingdom of Sand is an unfortunate late coming wrawl of self-indulgent sadness.
It’s another unredemptive exercise like the last book he published nearly two decades ago, Grief (though that was compared by some to Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking).
In this late-life yawn Holleran offers a sloppily-written, badly-edited, death-obsessed, ageist piece of ostensibly literary, fag misery with no relief unto an unknown grave.
Holleran’s characters are waiting to die while watching campy movies with fellow lonesome homos (along with gratuitous working-class handy-man characters), not knowing whether they are in Florida or D.C. or somewhere else in real time present or past.
The “story,” such as it might be, is set in a kind of geriatric gay Florida of well-off once promiscuous has-beens who are cruising into senescence.
Holleran offers up fleeting references to AIDS’s unresolved impact on these troubled men’s hazy pasts. Kingdom of Sand is a kind of Castle in the Air for ostensibly too old homos who can’t or don’t want to remember preferring life over death.
Sometimes, a writer needs to know when to stop writing.