Gay and lesbian fiction: Across time and place, frailty and fortitude

"Grief"
by Andrew Holleran
Hyperion, 150 pp., $19.95

Andrew Holleran ("Dancer from the Dance") doesn't publish frequently: just six works of fiction since 1978. So when he does bring out a new book, it's an event.

This brief, quiet novel may be his best yet.

Holleran, one of the generation of gay men hit hardest by AIDS, focused on vanished friends and lost youth in his previous novel, "The Beauty of Men." Here, however, it's the death of the narrator's aged mother, rather than a lover or friend, that gets things started.

Holleran's unnamed narrator, a college professor in his 50s, is given the chance to teach a course in Washington, D.C. He accepts the offer and rents a room near Dupont Circle from an antique dealer, also in his fifties, who is "a sort of homosexual emeritus. Sex had left him in its wake."

Both men are well-read, sophisticated, unattached. The professor is feeling especially isolated after his mother's death: "I belonged to no one now, and no one belonged to me."

In a more sentimental novel, this would be the set-up for a companionable "September Song" romance. But Holleran has something different in mind — a book that, for one thing, brings Henry Adams and Mary Todd Lincoln into the picture ... Adams as a widower whose wife committed suicide after nursing her father to his death, and Lincoln as the most famously distraught widow in American history.

Washington itself is a crucial character in the novel, too. As Holleran's professor walks the city's streets, peruses its museums and searches out its hidden history, he tries to get to the bottom of how loss, in different historical eras, has been accepted and loved ones remembered.

When he isn't engaged in these solitary ruminations, he's talking with various people — a colleague at school, a student, a dead friend's mother, his landlord — about the issue of grief. These exchanges have the bracing, searching spirit of Platonic dialogue and are spiced with some ruefully sardonic quips about aging in general. (My favorite: "You're only as old as your hair.")

The quirks of each character are subtly, flavorfully drawn. The book encompasses a surprising range of reactions to loss, presented without bias. And Holleran captures the contradictory character of our capital city — its wealth, its poverty, its idealistic past, its compromised present — with a rare facility.

"Touchy Subjects"
by Emma Donoghue
Harcourt, 280 pp., $24

Born in Ireland, raised in England and now living in Canada, Emma Donoghue takes as her canvas all her home places as well as a large swathe of the USA in this feisty new collection of 19 tales. There are even some brief glimpses of Seattle and Tacoma here.

The book is divided into five categories: "Babies," "Domesticity," "Strangers," "Desire" and "Death." The contemporary settings are in marked contrast to her two 18th-century-set novels "Slammerkin" and "Life Mask." What the stories have in common with the historical novels is their roguish sense of play, even as they alight on decidedly "touchy" subject matter.

The title story is a case in point. A nervous Irishman in early middle age meets his wife's best friend for a secret assignation at an upscale Dublin hotel. The woman has flown all the way from Seattle for this meeting — but it isn't what you think. Instead, it's a comically hazard-strewn attempt at sperm donation, with Donoghue capturing both the P.C. intentions and non-P.C. practical logistics of the matter with devilish delight.

Phantom babies, wished-for babies and pseudo-babies (rambunctious pet dogs) stir up trouble in the other "Babies" stories. But the funniest tale of the group is "Oops," in which a gay man is convinced for years of his "secret parenthood" of his beloved goddaughter, following an accident he had in the bathroom of the young girl's parents-to-be.

Veterinary bills, an overly conspicuous chin hair and a married couple's battles over house color cause problems in the stories grouped under "Domesticity," while in the tales about "Desire" various kinds of infatuation break loose — gay, lesbian and gender-uncertain.

The book's biggest surprise may be "Enchantment," about two rival Cajun fishermen trying to enter the tour-boat business. Its saddest entry is "Baggage," about an Irishwoman's search for her brother who has gone missing — either dead or stubbornly incommunicado — in Los Angeles.

Donoghue's light touch can handle everything from painful bewilderment to ridiculous tiffs to unexpected happiness. Certainly the sweet befuddled sperm donor in "Touchy Subjects" knows he's got a good thing going in his marriage.

"Secretly Inside"
by Hans Warren,
translated by S.J. Leinbach
Terrace Books/University of
Wisconsin Press, 99 pp., $16.95

From the archives comes this newly translated Dutch novel, first published in 1975 and set during Germany's occupation of the Netherlands during World War II.

The twist: Jewish protagonist Eduard, sent to hide in plain sight under an assumed identity with a farming family out in the sticks, finds the family more crazed and volatile than he expected. The question: How can he be safe with them when they have so little control over their emotions?

The daughter, engaged to an elderly farmer, is itching to get something sexual going with Ed. The son, mourning a dead German soldier who was his lover, is likewise smitten, for reasons his sister explains: Ed looks like the dead man.

It's a fascinating premise for a story, and a subversive twist on tales of wartime heroism and cunning. Warren (1921-2001) brings the oddities of the rural wartime experience tensely alive, especially the hazards involved in getting a whole farming village to agree to pretend that the urban Jew in their midst is a local yokel.

Still, the narrative itself isn't entirely satisfying. Just 70 pages long (the rest of the book is taken up by Jolanda Wanderwal Taylor's introduction), it's either exquisitely distilled or somewhat sketchy, depending on your take. I'd say "somewhat sketchy" — which makes it welcome news that the book is being made into a movie by Belgian filmmaker Bavo Defurne. Perhaps he'll flesh out some of its barer bones.

A word of warning: Taylor's introduction to the book is helpful, especially in what it has to say on "Dutch hiding narratives." But it gives away the entire plot. Best to save until after you've read the story.

He has been the Seattle Times book critic since 1998 and has published four novels.