Rating: 
Summary: Still Relevant, 20 Years Later
Review: I'd heard about Dancer from the Dance almost from the moment of my coming out. For 19 years I resisted; there just isn't much gay-themed literature that's any good. Dancer is the glorious exception. Beautifully written, and as relevant to the gay-male experience today as it was in the late 70s. More fascinating than the novel's central figure -- Malone, every man's favorite circuit boy -- is the nameless narrator, whom we scarcely come to know. This was an inspired device by Holleran, who recognizes the prospect that any one of us might lose our own identities in the pursuit and adoration of the beautiful Malones.
Rating:
Summary: Universal Truths
Review: I've had the privilege of chairing several literary-discussion groups that dealt with "Dancer from the Dance," one with all gay men, another with gay men and lesbians, a third with straight women. Everybody liked the book, but it means different things to different people. For the generation of gay men born between about 1940 and 1955, it is the story of their life, the pain of coming out and the lyricism of finding that first love as an adult. For younger gay men and lesbians it is partly a period piece but the emotional impact still holds true, as it does for the straight readers. The novel about the misunderstood, middle-class gay boy who grows up absurd, sublimates himself in a career, and then comes out with a bang in his mid-twenties is a cliche among gay American fiction, but I can think of no books that do it as well as "Dancer from the Dance." To know this book is to love it.
Rating:
Summary: Universal Truths
Review: I've had the privilege of chairing several literary-discussion groups that dealt with "Dancer from the Dance," one with all gay men, another with gay men and lesbians, a third with straight women. Everybody liked the book, but it means different things to different people. For the generation of gay men born between about 1940 and 1955, it is the story of their life, the pain of coming out and the lyricism of finding that first love as an adult. For younger gay men and lesbians it is partly a period piece but the emotional impact still holds true, as it does for the straight readers. The novel about the misunderstood, middle-class gay boy who grows up absurd, sublimates himself in a career, and then comes out with a bang in his mid-twenties is a cliche among gay American fiction, but I can think of no books that do it as well as "Dancer from the Dance." To know this book is to love it.
Rating:
Summary: Sad, Beautiful World
Review: I've never read anything quite like Andrew Holleran's sad and wise masterpiece "Dancer From the Dance." The novel is so rich and textured and filled with such nuance, I've read it no less than six times. There is something for everyone in it regardless of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. Because aren't we, like Malone, all looking for something more? For Malone, it's love and happiness. What could be more universal?
Rating: 
Summary: probably accurate but self centered
Review: If you are looking for a historical ( novel ) of a culture that is lazy and stupid then this is the book. I enjoyed the story, but the author, Andrew Holleran ,is a pseudonym. This information corrupts my review but at the time perhaps it says a lot of our society. Read this story only to find excess and wonderful things that we no longer have.
Rating:
Summary: The Gay Gatsby
Review: It seems kind of silly to try to measure, as if it were a science, the precise extent to which a work is a "classic," as many have done here. This is especially true when the work in question is only some 20 years old and the culture producing its critics is both notoriously bitchy and given to dissent. Having said that, far be it from me to hold myself aloof from the fray. Because for all the debate and qualification and feelings of guilt by association this novel seems sometimes to provoke in its readers, it's a classic. There, I've said it--the "c" word. If this book is not in print fifty years from now, we'll have lost what is for late 20th century American gay culture a canonical novel that is, in its own way, every bit as evocative and compelling as the works of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. (The comparison to Fitzgerald is in fact an apt one: this novel resonates with subtle references and allusions to The Great Gatsby--which, fifty years earlier, also documented great big parties frequented by plenty of lost souls on Long Island Sound. I think Holleran very much had Gatsby on his mind when he wrote this novel, and, to his great credit, this story warrants and benefits from the comparison.) Dancer captures a time and a place and a mood, and it does so with poetry and while telling a hell of a funny, debauched, and crushingly sad, story. Malone and Sutherland are both archetypes and real people, they are Huck and Jim in gay Manhattan, and we care deeply about them. We look forward to seeing what Sutherland will have to say next and to finding out how the beautiful and damned Malone--that über circuit queen--can screw up his life any further. Holleran's Malone and Sutherland are misguided, exaggerated and decadent, and frequently horrible moral role models. And they are all too human. Let me say this: I personally stopped all of my circuit-like behavior two years ago. I'm 37 and, as many of us know, that's ancient for a gay man. It was unseemly to keep doing what I was doing--something that Sutherland would have understood, even if he wouldn't necessarily have let his age stop him. Dancer from the Dance helped me put closure on that period of my life, my youth, and to do so with grace and a wistful smile and, yes, profound sadness. I don't have the option of getting lost in Long Island Sound. Instead, I did what Nick did at the end of Gatsby: I returned to my Midwestern roots. Knowing that Sutherland and Malone managed to escape that retreat somehow makes my own plight seem less mundane. Dancer From the Dance is a great book with all the hallmarks of a lasting work of literature--and time will have to prove me right on that.
Rating: 
Summary: A Sad Angel in Search For Love
Review: Love, love will tear us apart again and so sung Joy Divison and in this novel Malone is ripped to pieces. Set in the 1970's Manhattan, Dance From The Dance is a rueful testament of the times in the post-Stonewall gay community. Tha main character Malone leaves his cookie-cutter middle upper class WASPish life to become a full time denizen in New York's gay world. It is there that he teams up with Sutherland, the necessary Queen who helps him on his futile, yet honorable, journey to seek love. After running the entire circuit and back Sutherland hooks Malone up with a man he doesn't love but is very rich. In the end Malone escapes once again form his former life once again, but this time he plunges into anonymity. We aren't sure if he is drowned fleeting Fire Island or burned to death at the fire at the bathhouse. Holleran never tells us outright, but it really doesn't matter. Anthony Malone remains the beautiful gay man who is glamorous and tragic.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best gay novels yet published!
Review: Often cited as "the" gay novel of the post-Stonewall generation, "Dancer From the Dance" is a lyrical account of the frenetic life of gay men caught up in the hard-partying "circuit" of Manhattan and Fire Island in the mid-1970's. Hollaran's enigmatic protagonist, Anthony Malone, is a man of nearly unearthly masculine beauty who has left his unloved profession as a lawyer to pursue a life of lust and pleasure in his personal, endless search for love. Poetic, and often moving, the novel paints a colorful picture of a pack of driven hedonists, endlessly in quest of "the perfect man", moving through discos, bars, bathhouses, and parties of almost baroque proportions. The book is levened with comic moments, largely supplied by Sutherland, Malone's outrageous, advice spewing friend, mentor and den mother, who moves effortlessly between the heady worlds of the heterosexual jet set and the gay demimonde. Malone's wistful longing to recapture his one successful male-to-male relationship with the married, violent Frankie is hauntingly described. Overall, a very satisfying novel, vivid and vital despite the passivity of Malone. And the equivocal ending stays with one. Holleran's subsequent books have not been nearly as satisfying, but so profound an impact did "Dancer From the Dance" make on the gay community that, for years after its publication in 1977, anonymous graffiti appeared throughout New York's Greenwich Village, plaintively proclaiming: "Malone Lives!"Read it and see!
Rating:
Summary: One of the best gay novels yet published!
Review: Often cited as "the" gay novel of the post-Stonewall generation, "Dancer From the Dance" is a lyrical account of the frenetic life of gay men caught up in the hard-partying "circuit" of Manhattan and Fire Island in the mid-1970's. Hollaran's enigmatic protagonist, Anthony Malone, is a man of nearly unearthly masculine beauty who has left his unloved profession as a lawyer to pursue a life of lust and pleasure in his personal, endless search for love. Poetic, and often moving, the novel paints a colorful picture of a pack of driven hedonists, endlessly in quest of "the perfect man", moving through discos, bars, bathhouses, and parties of almost baroque proportions. The book is levened with comic moments, largely supplied by Sutherland, Malone's outrageous, advice spewing friend, mentor and den mother, who moves effortlessly between the heady worlds of the heterosexual jet set and the gay demimonde. Malone's wistful longing to recapture his one successful male-to-male relationship with the married, violent Frankie is hauntingly described. Overall, a very satisfying novel, vivid and vital despite the passivity of Malone. And the equivocal ending stays with one. Holleran's subsequent books have not been nearly as satisfying, but so profound an impact did "Dancer From the Dance" make on the gay community that, for years after its publication in 1977, anonymous graffiti appeared throughout New York's Greenwich Village, plaintively proclaiming: "Malone Lives!"
Read it and see!
Rating:
Summary: Dancer from the Dance
Review: On the surface, this book appears to be about homosexual life in NYC and Fire Island before AIDS hit. But it could be about anyone whose life is run (and ruined) by the impossible romantic notion that there is a perfect lover out there waiting to be found. Malone, the central figure of the book, is like Hemingway's Lady Brett, crazy to live life to the brim and to find the love that doesn't (or can't in Lady Brett's case) exist. The book is a classic (I am straight and thought it was as powerful as any novel I have read in a long time).It deserves a five-star rating.
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