Grief (2006) by Andrew Holleran

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Grief (2006)

by Andrew Holleran

Dupont Circle, Washington DC

Washington DC: 7/12

   Andrew Holleran taught at American University, my alma mater, and I recognized a similar world in this book, Grief, about a socially isolated gay academic who comes to Washington DC to teach an undergraduate course and rents a room from an older gay bureaucrat in the Federal Government who has a lot of things to say, mostly about the joys of loneliness and social isolation in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis. Holleran is well known for his books about gay life- starting with Dancer from the Dance, which chronicles the hedonistic ways of pre-AIDS, late 1970's New York City and Fire Island. 

  As one of the rare LGBT authors who was nationally recognized pre-AIDS epidemic, it's not surprising that all of his post epidemic writing has focused on questions of loss and loneliness, with an emphasis on family relationships and the strains illness causes.  Although the characters in Grief are marked by their surviving the epidemic, they function in a somewhat ghostly fashion, leaving DC itself to provide vibrancy.  Vibrant Dupont Circle in the fall, I can remember it well.  Like the characters in this book, I spent time in Dupont Circle just hanging out- amazed that one could do such a thing.