Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
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Andrew Holleran's novel Grief could be to fiction what Joan Didion's best-selling 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, was to non-fiction: A hit about how we consciously and unconsciously cope with the death and absence of someone we love.
Both books are slim. At 150 pages, Holleran's fourth novel (and his first in 10 years) could be considered a novella.
Grief, like Magical Thinking, is tempting to read in one sitting. Instead, it should be savored, because its emotional theme and elegiac tone are mesmerizing.
Grief's plot recalls Holleran's masterful 1996 novel, The Beauty of Men. An unnamed Florida professor has just buried his mother after her death in a nursing home. Beauty and Grief both show how one gay man confronts loss.
A decade ago, the middle-aged protagonist in Beauty masked his sorrow by sleeping around. In Grief, the main character is no scarlet professor. For him, mourning becomes electric, a charge and a chance to discover how he wants to live.
He flies to Washington, D.C., on a Saturday, a day "the airports were so empty it felt like I was passing through Limbo -- from one life to the next." His destination is literary, not political. He'll substitute-teach a university AIDS literature course.
Outside class in the nation's capital, he is surrounded by museums ("morgues," one friend says), monuments and memorials. "It was the perfect city for grief: Like walking through a cemetery."
One grave figure haunts his imagination, courtesy of a volume of published letters left by a previous occupant of his rented room: the widow Mary Todd Lincoln, whose grieving made her a caricature of "self-pity, melodrama, camp."
Grief has camp wit, too. The professor's Dupont Circle landlord is "a sort of homosexual emeritus." A friend tells him "grief is useless after a certain point," especially compared with having a boyfriend.
But the distraught professor has little taste for connection, and he's not ready to cut the spiritual apron string to his mother's memory. "Grief is what you have after someone you love dies," he says. "It's the only thing left of that person."
What remains of the person doing the grieving? Must the griever be consumed by loss?
Holleran offers several options, and the professor takes a less-traveled road after he realizes home is "where someone waits for you."
The final destination might dismay some readers, but will not disappoint.
Grief
By Andrew Holleran
Hyperion, 150 pp., $19.95
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