Grief by Andrew Holleran is about grief.  The novel begins as the story of a middle-aged man grieving after the death of his mother.  He leaves the small town where he cared for her for a period of years, and goes to Washington, D.C. to rent a room from a man roughly his own age, and of his same sexual orientation, gay.  The novel then begins to build as an exploration of all sorts of grief: grief of a wife for her husband (personified in the grief of Mary Todd Lincoln for Abraham after his assassination, and explored through a collection of her letters); grief of a mother for her child, as understood through his sudden friendship with the mother of a friend who died;  grief among friends for all the friends lost to AIDs; and, subtly (the only subtle note in the novel), grief for life passing by.

This is a quiet but largely Socratic exploration of grief, as the narrator’s main activity is discussing grief, his own and that of Mary Todd, and that caused by both the AIDs devastation and the lifestyle that left so many gay man alone in their middle-aged years when they should have been surrounded by friends and lovers. He has discussions with his landlord, the good friend who brought him to Washington to teach, acquaintances, and his students.  Although interesting, neither the discussions nor the novel add new insights or perspectives on the exploration of grief, the differences between how it is manifested in people, the degree to which it resurfaces again and again, and the nature of others’ reactions to grief, either tolerance or suspicious of the griever being self-indulgent, or a certain impatience with the persistence of the emotion. Nor do we get a real sense of our narrator’s grief: it is a mixture of guilt and loneliness and depression over what life still holds for him, but is that really grief?  I suppose it is, but it is not sorrow.

Now that would have been interesting, an exploration of the difference between sorrow and grief.  I propose that sorrow is sadness for all that the one left behind and the one who died have lost; grief, on the other hand, is more self-centered, an overtaking of the soul of the one left behind, where no future can be imagined.  Sorrow allows for a future, but grief does not? Henry Adams’ wife killed herself after the father she had cared for during a hard illness died: overcome by grief, she felt like a failure who could not go on.  Mary Todd drove herself crazy, always yearning for the death that would reunite her with her husband. Our narrator himself is persistently opaque about his own future and yet he states the most beautiful — and optimistic — sentence of the book:  “Grief is like Osiris; cut up in parts and thrown into the Nile.  It fertilizes in ways we cannot know, the pieces of flesh bleed into every part of our lives, flooding the earth, till eventually Life appears once more.”  Yes, Life has a way of doing that, popping up in the guise of a budding cherry tree or clouds scudding across the sky or the taste of something delicious or the smile of someone loved; it pops up and draws you back in.  That is the miracle, proof against sorrow.  But does grief blind you to Life?

There is much in this novel about the depression of middle-agers approaching the end portion of their life, a rounding out of days without much to look forward to, either than more deaths of friends and continued loneliness.  Our narrator will return to his small town and his mother’s house, and putter along, and his landlord will try to find companionship in more than just his loyal dog but neither are optimistic about any excitement occurring in the future.  The narrator wishes to offer his students:  “a warning, in essence, that whether your husband was assassinated beside you as you sat watching a third-rate play, or you tripped on a rug and broke your neck, or were infected in a moment of sexual passion (or boredom, or loneliness) by a fatal virus, life had a way of suddenly flipping, and that something, sometime, somewhere, almost certainly would flip it for them“;  in the end, he decides to say nothing because “it would all sound morbid.”  But he misses the point completely: life flips both ways, tipping you to sorrow unexpectedly but also, always, there is the possibility of tipping toward joy.  Not all surprises are grim, and change can come quite suddenly, and quite happily.  As long as you are alive to the experience, and not shut down by grief.