Pausing briefly during his round of almost motorised erotic delights in New York, the hero of Andrew Holleran’s first novel, Dancer from the Dance, proclaims the glory of gay liberation and foresees its doom. “We’re completely free,” he says, “and that’s the horror.” This was in 1978; three years later, Aids curtailed the disco-fuelled revels and Holleran began to write essays about a city that had turned into an ashen graveyard. His subsequent novels, published at intervals of a decade or more, have tracked a long withdrawal – from New York to Florida, where Holleran moved to care for his aged parents, and from hedonism to the metaphysical gloom or “morose delectation” that he absorbed from his Jesuit education.
