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Summary: If I Only Had One Book to Take to A Heterosexual Desert...
Review: ...it would be Andrew Holleran's beautiful, wickedly funny, decadent freshman novel, "Dancer from the Dance". The appelation has been given to many books, but "Dancer" is for me the all-time greatest gay novel. While a plot-and-character summary would make it sound like a narrowly focused, thinly disguised documentary of gay hedonism in pre-AIDS New York City, "Dancer"'s images and dialogue are uniquely evocative and memorable. Holleran's prose has a rare expressive quality, and his descriptions truly haunt the reader. Guiding the reader through the wreckage and beauty of 1970s New York are two brilliant characters, Malone and Sutherland. Malone is a fallen Adonis, a well-bred WASP young man who, after a moment of unexpected passion in his Manhattan office late one night, begins gorging himself on the overripe fruit of the city's sexual life. After his first romantic disaster, Malone is rescued, taken in, and mentored by the bitchy, high-camp, mad-genius Sutherland. As they careen between raunch and glamour, Sutherland dispenses Wildean aphorisms on life, love, and sex. While every step of the way serving as Sutherland's accomplice in drugs, dishing, discos, and designer demimondes, Malone the whore retains an all-Middle-American vision of finding true love. Truly, Malone and Sutherland are two of 20th-century literature's most memorable protagonists. But it is Holleran's unparalleled ability to evoke lasting images of New York City during a halcyon period for gay men that makes "Dancer" an unforgettable and absolutely necessary read. If you're gay and have a pulse, read this book. I've read "Dancer" at least a dozen times and it never fails to provoke both laughter and tears.
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Summary: A beautiful book and a true classic
Review: Andrew Holleran is a beautiful writer. His style is vivid yet dreamlike. I read this book a couple of years after it first came out and I never forgot it. Already the world was starting to change and yet that New York hedonsistic gay lifestyle had really spread to other gay urban areas. I think most of us knew a Sutherland and a Malone. Anyway, it is funny, moving and an amazing snapshot of what the gay lifestyle was like at the time. To younger readers who dismiss this as the olden days, I say two words: Circuit Party. Now, read the book the again.
Rating:
Summary: A beautiful book and a true classic
Review: Andrew Holleran is a beautiful writer. His style is vivid yet dreamlike. I read this book a couple of years after it first came out and I never forgot it. Already the world was starting to change and yet that New York hedonsistic gay lifestyle had really spread to other gay urban areas. I think most of us knew a Sutherland and a Malone. Anyway, it is funny, moving and an amazing snapshot of what the gay lifestyle was like at the time. To younger readers who dismiss this as the olden days, I say two words: Circuit Party. Now, read the book the again.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Pair in Poker Hand: 2 Queens
Review: Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance and Jack Fritscher's Some Dance to Remember. Two wonderful 1970s novels that read more real than fiction.
Rating: 
Summary: Beauty is really only page deep
Review: Being an avid reader of gay books, I really wanted to like Dancer, given its hype as one of the classic gay novels and its increasing importance as the most authoritative text on gay life before the AIDS crisis. The first half of the book was fast-paced, witty, and delightful with Holleran writing some passages of sheer beauty and painful truth. Yet, by the time Malone, a man who not only has the perfect face and body but can do no wrong (he cheats wantonly on his sexy BF but it is really the BF's fault for not having been awed enough by Malone), becomes the centerpiece of the story, Holleran sacrifices a perceptive and inteligent narrative to cheesy romance. There are many points about gay life, culture, etc. to squibble about in Dancer but its the writing itself that falters terribly in the second half as it gives way to the kind of pronouncements, sweeping generalizations, and overworked plot devices that are a fixture of bodice-rippers rather than a 'classic of gay literature'. In its pages are some sober truths about gay life which have not changed in the last thirty years but when they're uttered by a narrator that seems to have lost all perception and humor, they fall flat. Perhaps the best use of Dancer is as a literary historical record, for reading it makes you realize how far gay-oriented literature has come. Read for history (or for a class in college) but not for substance. In fact, that is the one truth that comes out of this work- there is very little substance in any of the people, issues, or events it tackles (beauty worship, gay cliques, the ignorant stereotyping of men of color, bathhouse sojourns, etc.). However, considering how seriously the Violet Quill took itself, it can only be unintentional.
Rating: 
Summary: Exasperating classic
Review: Friends had always recommended this work to me, but I'd avoided it, having read Holleran's other work and found it really pretentious, when not sad. I finally gave in. Dancer is exasperating: it is a 70s period piece, yet parts of it apply so succinctly to late 90s gay life, almost as if the AIDS crisis never happened. Unsettling. Parts of the novel are very well-written, but be warned: like all of Holleran's books, there is a lot of purple prose here. And despite my criticism, it is worth reading and deserves its place as a classic.
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Summary: A MASTERPIECE!
Review: I bought the hardcover release of this when it debuted in 1978 and have read it each year since then. I'm still dazzled by Holleran's unique, breathtaking writing style and, except for Edmund White and his own savvy style, have found no other authors who can mesmerize me so completely. Though my emotional and intellectual reactions have changed over the subsequent 26 years' annual readings and my interpretations, too, have adjusted, this tome is like a family dog--always ready to incite happiness, fascination, and wonderment.
Rating: 
Summary: To be young in the summer in New York...
Review: I bought this novel on the strength of an extracted chapter in an anthology on 5 decades of popular music; it was included in the area covering disco. The chapter in question (taken from an early part of the book) is mesmerizing. It describes the rise and subsequent decline of the fictitious (I think!) Eleventh Floor nightclub in Manhattan ca. 1976. I wasn't let down by the rest of the book, though I agree with the reviewer (below) who remarked that Holleran has been known to lapse into purple prose at times. Sometimes his descriptions of sizzling summers, endless autumn afternoons, etc., are rendered beautifully, and sometimes they just miss the mark. It doesn't matter so much, since he has created what may be (dare I say) the "definitive", most-likely-to-last novel of gay life in Manhattan and Fire Island in the disco era. The character of "sweet prince" Malone, by the way, seems to me more like a dream than anything else - a combination (highly arguably) of a venerated gay 'angel' and an idealized version of Holleran himself?
I do find that, in spots, Holleran is too self-consciously trying to create a 'lyrical' novel (and he may have let himself be influenced too much by Scott Fitzgerald, as pointed out by another reviewer.) The book also gets repetitive at times in its descriptions of, for example, the generic dark-eyed Puerto Rican messenger boys that turn up everywhere. (OK, I didn't live through the era, and I would have been female at that, so I'm probably not the best person to judge.) The letters at the beginning and end of the novel are well crafted, sad, touching and funny, and the character of Sutherland (similar to the drag queen mentor described in Edmund White's "The Beautiful Room is Empty" is wise and memorable. 4 stars from this "uninitiated" reader.
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Summary: Lyrical and poignant
Review: I consider this the most moving piece of gay fiction I have ever read. Yes, at times it is "glamorous", but it portrays the veneer of liberation, the excitement of anonymous sex, whilst slowly exposing the emptiness, and the need to move on, and imbue ones life with greater meaning. Utterly beautiful, verging on spirtiual.
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Summary: What happened to Malone?
Review: I just reread this book after about 17 years, and I still cannot come to a resolution over the ending. In many ways, it is a wonderfully ambiguous ending, but infuriating at the same time. I keep rereading parts,and looking for clues to the puzzle. Malone represented different things to different people, and consequently, his fate should be open to interpretation. In the end was he just a middle class boy with middle class values, and could not take the guilt of his hedonistic lifestyle, or was he wise and strong enough to know that at 38 the party was over. He was in the process of saying good-bye to New York and his life there, but what are we to make of where he was going? Sutherland's fate was no surprise, he was destined to burn out, not fade away. But Malone always had this sad wistfulness. His endless search for love and beauty was a quest with no chance of fulfillment. Where would someone like him go after New York? As I write this, I am thinking, yes, that swim was his last. It is nice to think he is growing old in a coastal town in Nova Scotia, but somehow, I don't see it. What do others make of the ending and Malone's fate.
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