Nights in Aruba

By Andrew Holleran

Tags: Gay, Literary Fiction

"Nights in Aruba succeeds wonderfully at being at the same time a deeply serious revelation and very lively, very satisfying company." — New York Magazine

Andrew Holleran's follow-up to Dancer from the Dance, Nights in Aruba is a classic novel of love shared and love concealed told with wry humor and subtle lyricism.

Nights in Aruba, Andrew Holleran's second, more reflective novel, centers around the dual life that its protagonist, Paul, leads between his fast paced "out" life in New York City and his extended visits to aging parents in Florida. He cannot quite believe what his life has become: "I had arrived at middle age and realized I had made no progress, that the moment was past—just as I would look up from a book I was reading on a Saturday in summer and realize when I saw the clock that the last decent train to the beach had left already." Years after accepting his sexuality after some electrifying time in the army and living on the Lower East Side, Paul is eventually bored by the hijinks of sex and drugs in the Manhattan disco scene.

His musings and development through the novel center around his coming to terms with his homosexuality, his Catholic upbringing in Aruba, and his relationship with his parents - a businesslike father, and a bored, commanding, unfulfilled mother.

“Brilliant passages and observations. . . . Mr. Holleran’s powers of physical description have not dimmed.” — New York Times Book Review

'Takes the rite-of-passage novel a step further. . . . Andrew Holleran writes with enormous insight and compassion.' — Newsday

“A fine, thoughtful novel. . . . Holleran’s descriptive passages of time and place are written with love and precision; his dialogue is sharp and true.” — Los Angeles Times

“A memorable book. . . . Anyone who has ever been in a family will find home truths in it.” — Boston Globe

'Succeeds wonderfully. . . . A very lively and deeply serious revelation of the homosexual world.' — New York magazine

'Discovering the place where miraculous begins by poking around in the ordinary and day-to-day, his perfect prose takes root in his digging about in the imperfect ways we manage our lives. One does not ask what with Holleran's work, but how-how does it affect you, how does he do it? . . . This is full scale lyricism, taking us places we have never been before - to new dimensions of wistfulness, regret and arcane love.' — The Body Politic

'A skillfully crafted work that confirms Holleran as a figure of major literary importance.' — Library Journal

'There is, in fact, a comic beauty in Holleran's despair, a suppleness in his writing. . . That is despair very stylishly got up, and Nights in Aruba succeeds wonderfully at being at the same time a deeply serious revelation and very lively, very satisfying company.' — Edith Milton, New York Magazine

'Genuinely affecting. . . . Holleran's deceptively cool, collected prose doesn't hide the uneasy longing at the heart of this book.' — Publishers Weekly

'Holleran has outdone himself. Nights in Aruba is probably the best-written 'gay novel' to date.' — In Print