Farm families got together with neighbors at school programs, church dinners, or dances. We were all in the same boat." Neighbors helped each other through hard times, sickness, and accidents. People who grew up during the Depression said, "No one had any money. Many farm families raised most of their own food eggs and chickens, milk and beef from their own cows, and vegetables from their gardens. York County farm families didn't have heat, light or indoor bathrooms like people who lived in town. Weather touched every part of life in the "Dirty 30s": dust, insects, summer heat and winter cold. The government programs that helped them to live through the 1930s changed the future of agriculture forever. It was so easy to love the town in the dark.The Great Depression changed the lives of people who lived and farmed on the Great Plains and in turn, changed America. (“As the light faded, a sort of mysterious dignity descended on the town, until, when it was completely dark, it assumed another personality altogether. (“This demented attachment to things was visible on every street when I took my walk at night, the backyards that looked like a used car dealership, the motorboats, trailers, lawn mowers, gadgets of every kind sitting on the extra lot.”) As does the changing light in Florida. (“There were houses that simply could not be lived in they were too close to the library or main street, the interface between the public and residential.”) As do the useless things that households collect. Like Naipaul and McGahern, Holleran is intrigued by the sheer strangeness of his immediate neighbors, how odd and interesting is anyone observed with such care over time. The isolation, the long solitary walks taken, allow the writer to look outward, to examine the changing day closely and meticulously, to study a close-knit world, thus building up a complete picture not only of the surroundings but of how time moves in a single place. Naipaul’s “The Enigma of Arrival” and John McGahern’s “By the Lake,” introspection occurs by implication and suggestion. What Holleran does in “The Kingdom of Sand” is close to what two other books, whose solitary authors observe a rural world, do too: In V.S. He studies the lake: “Now the drought had gone on so long that something unexpected had happened: the dry lake bed had become more beautiful than the lake.” He watches birds: “There were egrets and hawks and bald eagles, blackbirds and wood ducks and sandhill cranes, a flock of turkeys, and shadows on the ground that made me look up in the sky to see buzzards circulating on currents of air.” He is interested in the rhythms of days and the rhythms of the natural world around him and the texture of what gets lost with the years. This, really, is Holleran’s great subject. In this melancholy world that Holleran creates with such stoic accuracy and sad acceptance, nothing happens - except that time passes. “It was the perfect friendship: we were together when we wanted to be and otherwise independent.” Despite their differences, the two men are close. Earl watches movies, reads history books, listens to opera and harbors right-wing views. He forms a friendship with a gay man called Earl, older than himself, who also lives alone nearby. The small city of Gainesville, “half an hour to the west,” offers little comfort: “There’s no way around it: Gainesville gets you in the end.” “The problem was that my life had acquired an element of sexual frustration unlike anything I’d ever felt before,” he laments. The police have clamped down on the cruising ground. In “The Kingdom of Sand,” Holleran’s fifth novel, the narrator - nameless, this time- is living in the same Florida house many years after his mother’s death. He no longer has any reason to go anywhere, really.” After the death of his mother, he “has no one to disappoint or lie to or feel guilty about.” Soon, however, he finds himself back at the boat ramp. Gradually, he becomes intrigued by two men who are staying nearby.Īt the end of Holleran’s novel “The Beauty of Men,” published in 1997, a man called Lark, living close to a boat ramp in northern Florida - a gay cruising spot - decides that “he has no reason to go there anymore. In his short story “In September, the Light Changes” (part of a collection from 2000 of the same name), his protagonist has stayed on Fire Island after Labor Day, at first relishing the emptiness and the palpable absences and then accepting that he has, in some way, been left behind by others (“He had arranged his life, he realized, to be alone, and the world had granted him his arrangement, like a child the rest of the family lets stay in his room at dinner”). Andrew Holleran is fascinated by solitude, the comfort it offers and the discontent that follows.
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