Becca Rothfeld, nonfiction critic
Sometimes I know exactly why I pick up a book — I’m reviewing it, I’m reviewing something related to it, it’s high on the interminable list of books I know I ought to have read already, I saw an essay about it that galvanized me to crack it open — and sometimes I have absolutely no idea. So much of my literary life is project-oriented that I try to obey my more obscure urgings when they boil up and nag at me. I do not know why I opted to begin Andrew Holleran’s 1978 debut novel, “Dancer From the Dance,” last week, but it ravished me. A chronicle of gay life in New York in the 1970s, in the delirious years before the onslaught of AIDS, it is a book about a culture bewitched by beauty. Its two protagonists, lovelorn Malone and extravagantly glamorous Sutherland, dance their way through the druggie ecstasies of the party circuit in search of transcendence. Holleran is funny, and his characters are at once entirely human and mythically aloof, but above all, he is a dazzling stylist. “Dancer From the Dance” is an embodiment of the beauty its characters seek with such single-minded and sometimes desperate fervor. Holleran’s prose is so luscious I wish I could reach out and touch it.
