18 saturday review Saturday June 11 2022 | the timespaperbacks
Beautiful World, Where Are You
by Sally Rooney Faber, £8.99
Irish wunderkind Sally Rooney’s
first two novels — Conversations
with Friends and Normal People —
sold in the millions, were adapted
into BBC dramas and led her to be
dubbed “the first great millennial
novelist”. Does her third, the story
of best friends Alice and Eileen,
who met (as all Rooney characters
do) at Trinity College, Dublin, live
up to the hype? Some reviewers
were sceptical, but James Marriott
in The Times described it as a
“beautiful and serious” look at “how
to live seriously in a society that
seems to despise beautiful things,
to loathe serious thought and to
overlook the countless casual
cruelties necessary to its ordinary
functioning”. Sound overly
earnest? Never fear: “The novelalso contains some of the most
explicit sex scenes Rooney, below,
has written.” Thank goodness.Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for
Life by Jordan Peterson
Penguin, £10.99
The stern, identity politics-skewering
2018 self-help book cum
philosophy tract Twelve
Rules for Life turned
Jordan Peterson from
a quirky but unread
Canadian
psychology
professor into the
world’s most
important
conservative
intellectual. Beyond
Order is his follow-up.
What to make of it?
While James Marriott (him
again) wrote, “I tend to believe that
society needs to be prodded by
bonkers, renegade intellectuals such
as Peterson”, he finds Peterson’s
prose “repetitious, unvariegated,
rhythmless, opaque and possessed ofa suffocating sense of its own
importance”. His philosophy is also
bonkers: a character called “the
dragon of chaos” features
prominently.Odd Boy Out by Gyles Brandreth
Penguin, £10.99
“Gyles Brandreth has not been
overly basted with the
gravy of modesty,”
Patrick Kidd wrote, a
fact that is very
much apparent in
the broadcaster’s
witty, warm,
heavily name-
dropping memoir.
There’s childhood
friend Julian
Fellowes (“the only
Oscar-winner with
whom I have shared a bath”)
and Richard Branson, who
suggested he and Brandreth go into
business together while they were
still at school. This is no mere
anthology of famous encounters,
however. “At its heart it is a movingand very affectionate family history,
ending in a beautiful tribute to his
father — ‘dear, sweet, lovable Pa’ —
from whom he inherited a habit of
hoarding anecdotes and quotations.”The Bomber Mafia: A Tale of
Innovation and Obsession by
Malcolm Gladwell Penguin, £10.99
In this intriguing but insubstantial
book, the bestselling author Malcolm
Gladwell examines a small group of
Second World War American airmen
who rejected the logic that modern
aerial warfare necessitates
indiscriminate killing of civilians (in
air raids, for instance) and set out to
use science and technology to limit
its lethality. They invested huge
energy into experimental
technologies, such as eccentric Dutch
émigré Carl Norden’s “Norden
bombsight”, which was supposed to
be able to drop a bomb into a pickle
barrel from six miles up. In practice,
they failed miserably from stopping
mass death from the air. “The Bomber
Mafia reminds me of a really good
podcast — a fascinating story isappealingly delivered,” Gerard
DeGroot wrote. “But podcasts are
not books. While I admire brevity,
the subject demands more depth
than this volume provides.”Free: Coming of Age at the End of
History by Lea Ypi Penguin, £9.99
Lea Ypi’s memoir — shortlisted last
year for the Costa biography award
and the Baillie Gifford prize for non-
fiction — begins with an account of
her childhood in the dying days of
communist Albania, then follows her
family’s fortunes as the country
descends from hope to anarchy. As
the economy collapses and gangsters
flourish, the ordinary oddness of an
everyday life governed by endless
queues and patchy news of the
outside world becomes frightening
and violent. Ypi, a professor of
political theory at LSE, writes
unflinchingly and with humour: “In
my family, everyone had a favourite
revolution, just as everyone had a
favourite summer fruit.” It is, Emma
Duncan wrote, “a remarkable story,
stunningly told.”and his friendship with Earl, a man 21 years
his senior.
The narrator met Earl at a cruising
ground after he moved from New York to
Florida in 1983 to look after his ailing
parents. They have finally died, after long,
undignified old ages, but he has stayed in
Gainesville, uncertain what else to do. The
narrator watches black-and-white movies
with Earl or searches for casual sex in the
back room of the video store (“Porno-
graphic fantasies disintegrated at the sight
of the glum and silent men walking up and
down the hallways... egg-shaped men in
loose T-shirts”). Not much happens, ex-
cept ageing.
On every page the angel of death beats
its wings — heart attacks on golf courses,
“morgue farts”, amputations, strokes,
floors stained by the body juices of a slow-
to-be-discovered corpse. If we’re not pre-
sented with death and decline itself, the
characters talk about it. “We are nothingbut our medical records,” the narrator
says. As single gay men, his friends fear
what the Japanese call kodokushi, lonely
deaths; they fret about clearing out their
houses, removing shameful stashes of
porn mags such as Honcho so as not to bur-
den the executors of their will.
It is bracingly necromaniac, but Holler-
an has a puckishly morbid sense of hu-
mour. We’re told that the fruity old novel-
ist Howard Sturgis, lying on his deathbed
while being cared for ever so solicitously
by his life partner, quipped that “a watched
pot never boils”. The narrator remarks of
his habitual, ever more fruitless search for
sex at the video store: “Yet here we were —
searching, I suspect, for more than sex
could give us. The ancient Greeks thought
old men obtained virility by ingesting the
semen of young ones. Nowadays you take
a multivitamin.” Another character makes
a killer case for relationships to the scepti-
cal narrator: “You have to let people inleather chaps A couple partying on the gay scene at a Manhattan disco in 1979O
ld age is no country for gay
men. As the seventysome-
thing narrator of The Kingdom
of Sand ruefully admits: “The
cliché that homosexuals are
such aesthetes that images of old age tend
to horrify them is not entirely untrue; how
else do we explain the age segregation in
gay bars?... I was by now used to watching
the heads of young men coming toward
me on the sidewalk look away so quickly
that all I could think of was Linda Blair’s
head spinning in The Exorcist.”
So what are gay men supposed to do
when the inevitable happens? Dye our
hair purple and turn ourselves into Quen-
tin Crisp of the anecdotage years? When
middle age strikes should we hide under a
bush like a sick cat and wait to die? Many
go into a state of denial — this is the age of
the fiftysomething clubber, their disco tits
swollen by steroids and obsessive gym-go-
ing, their faces so Botoxed and fillered they
look like wax effigies of themselves. When
the lights come on it’s not a pretty sight.
Andrew Holleran, the author of Dancer
from the Dance, a 1978 cult classic about
the gay scene in Seventies New York,
makes us look at the reality of old age.
His new novel, The Kingdom of Sand, is
gloriously death-obsessed. It’s the story of
an unnamed narrator, already of retire-
ment age, who muses on life, his parentsbooks
When the
disco dancing
queens get old
The great chronicler of
1970s gay hedonism is
brutally honest on old
age, says Robbie Millen
your life. Someone has to pick you up after
a colonoscopy.”
Holleran, who will be 80 next year, is a
keen-eyed observer. Our bodies shrink as
we age, but the bits don’t shrink at the same
pace. The narrator describes how his
friend “slumped in the chair beside mine
seemed to have been reduced to three ele-
ments: belly, hands, and glasses”. There is a
beautiful description of how we fade away:
“Earl was collapsing, like a star; he was
going to fall silent, like a satellite so far out
in space its signals can no longer reach the
Earth.” At first sight it might seem incon-
gruous that Holleran, who made his name
chronicling the hedonistic energy of New
York’s 1970s party scene, should have writ-
ten this novel. But Dancer from the Dance,
“the first literary triumph of the era of gay
liberation in the US”, according to Alan
Hollinghurst, turns out, on a reread, to be
a danse macabre. Written before the Aids
epidemic, it is nonetheless a tale of
“doomed queens” who drop dead from sui-
cide or overdose on angel dust. Partying is
“the only antidote to death we have”. “I’m
a jaded queen,” announces a character
who at 38 feels distant from a new genera-
tion of beautiful, dancing young men.
Although Dancer from the Dance is
waspishly funny (a small penis is “the lep-
rosy of homosexuals”; “dawn, that most in-
sulting moment for the homosexual”) its
overall tone is elegiac and melancholic.
The obsessive pursuit of fleeting sexual
happiness, the ceaseless dancing to keep
reality at bay, dooms the characters to life-
long unhappiness. They become slaves to
sex. A ludicrous ghost appears at a party —
“Roger Denton. The size queen who
moved to San Francisco because he had
had everyone in New York. She’s back,
dear, and looking for new meat.”
We are warned about “the great homo-
sexual disease — the sanctity of the face
seen and never spoken to”; momentary
glimpses of men in restaurants, on street
corners, in subways, idealised expressions
of the beauty of men who are always better
than the reality of what we could settle for.
If not prisoners of sex, then prisoners of
unrealistic romantic expectations.
Read the noisy, brash, subversive Dancer
from the Dance, and its older, more muted
brother, The Kingdom of Sand. They both
explore the same thing — being gay and
living/dying alone — from different points
on the cycle of life.The Kingdom
of Sand
by Andrew HolleranJonathan Cape,
258pp; £14.99JILL FREEDMAN/GETTY IMAGES‘You have to
let people in
your life.
Someone has
to pick you
up after a
colonoscopy’