Grief (novel) - Literary Significance and Reception

Literary Significance and Reception

Holleran’s novel, Grief, had a great initial reception among gay literature critics. Even popular critics commemorated Grief for its craftsmanship and the intense themes it evokes within the story. For example, "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. 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."

• "The parallels between Grief 's emotionally immured protagonist and Mary Lincoln, ravaged and ultimately destroyed by grief over her husband's death, are evident but not overplayed. And the narrator's decision as to how to live the remainder of his life seems as etched in stone as the words he reads on the city's monuments. Still, in the end, Holleran's moving novel is mostly about human resilience and hope; our enduring need to love, despite our losses. The beautiful life is brief: all the more reason to embrace it."

by Elizabeth Hand (Washington Post)

• "It is a testament to Holleran’s extraordinary skill that out of such mundane details he has assembled a story resonant with the tragedies of three American centuries. Grief captures the heartbreak of a generation-plus of gay men, men now well advanced in middle age, many of whom after the carnage of the plague can scarcely believe that they themselves are still alive."

by Lewis Gannet (Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide)

• "Holleran handles a sensitive topic with nuance and care, peppering his narrative with discriminating observations about sex, love, life, death - and grief. Whether your husband is assassinated beside you as you sit watching a third-rate play or whether you are infected in a moment of sexual passion by a fatal virus, life has way of suddenly flipping so that you can end up dying internally, even spiritually, while still being physically alive."

by Michael Leonard (Curled Up With a Good Book)