[BRIEF NOTE] Andrew Holleran

[rfmcdonald]

I've never been able to attach myself to the works of the gay American writer Andrew Holleran, alumnus of the Violet Quill (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I only realized why yesterday, while I was reading his 1988 anthology Ground Zero. Holleran's works have achieved such an degree of technical perfection, immaculate and flawless and perfectly objective, that they don't engage the first-person narrator at all. Why bother? There's no there there. Compare, from the world of English-language Canadian literature, Michael Ondaatje.