Grief
by Andrew Holleran
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Book Summary Information
Author: Andrew HolleranEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-06-05
ISBN: 1401308945
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: Hyperion
Book Reviews of Grief
Book Review: Living with the dead in a city of ghosts
Summary: 5 Stars
In Andrew Holleran's "Grief"--a book that will, I think, be eventually regarded as his masterpiece--there are passages that seem pulled from a Jamesian ghost story. Slim yet fully realized, the novel is set in a tranquil, atmospheric District of Columbia that may as well be a ghost town, a landscape similar to the city eerily described in Gore Vidal's short story "A Moment of Green Laurel." And like Vidal's protagonist, the unnamed narrator of "Grief" is haunted by the specter of his mother, while the urban isolation is deepened by memories of a generation lost to AIDS and even by the century-old spirits of famous Americans.
Far from being a gloomy read, however, Holleran's novel is infused with wit and erudition; it is instead an almost celebratory ode to mourning--and to our nation's capital. The story's central character has come to Washington ostensibly to teach a course on Literature and AIDS but actually to learn to live again both outside the confines of a closeted existence and without the decade-long presence of his mother's debilitating illness.
But, even removed from his home, he can't escape death. He becomes entranced with a book of letters by Mary Todd Lincoln, describing her desolation after her husband's assassination; he recalls Henry Adams's devastating numbness after his wife had killed herself when her father died; he tours museums in a city whose "grandeur is mostly indebted to the Civil War"; he visits the mother of a dead friend ("When one needed a mother, anyone's would do"); and he steadfastly avoids any possibility of intimacy with his fellow survivors of an earlier era. His closest companion is his landlord's dog when the man is away at work.
Every mourner in the novel experiences grief as remorse, as guilt, as regret. ("It was the sense of guilt that made it so important. Otherwise one didn't grieve for death," as Graham Greene puts it in "The Heart of the Matter.") Bereavement becomes not only longing for the presence of lost ones but also lamenting the lost opportunities when they were still alive: "I killed my mother with my secret and my shame. I killed her with banality," Holleran's narrator moans.
To such wallowing sentiment--to the suspicion that "life's rotten"--the landlord exclaims, "We have an obligation to live in the present--to be happy now!" Only Frank (a friend whose outlook, equal parts sardonic camp and weary cynicism, keeps the book's glumness firmly in check) understands that such an obligation is "more easily honored in the breach than the observance." Still, in the end, the ever-present possibility of hope and the ever-intruding presence of the living make that obligation easier to observe with the healing passage of time. After death, there is always life.
Summary of Grief
Now in paperback, the universally acclaimed novel about loss and yearningReeling from the recent death of his invalid mother, an exhausted, lonely professor comes to our nation's capital to escape his previous life. What he finds there -- in his handsome, solitary landlord; in the city's somber mood and sepulchral architecture; and in the strange and impassioned journals of Mary Todd Lincoln -- shows him unexpected truths about America and loss.General Books
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