“Dancer From the Dance” is an embodiment of the beauty its characters seek with such single-minded and sometimes desperate fervor. Holleran is funny, and his characters are at once entirely human and mythically aloof, but above all, he is a dazzling stylist. Its two protagonists, lovelorn Malone and extravagantly glamorous Sutherland, dance their way through the druggie ecstasies of the party circuit in search of transcendence. A chronicle of gay life in New York in the 1970s, in the delirious years before the onslaught of AIDS, it is a book about a culture bewitched by beauty. I do not know why I opted to begin Andrew Holleran’s 1978 debut novel, “Dancer From the Dance,” last week, but it ravished me. So much of my literary life is project-oriented that I try to obey my more obscure urgings when they boil up and nag at me. Sometimes I know exactly why I pick up a book - I’m reviewing it, I’m reviewing something related to it, it’s high on the interminable list of books I know I ought to have read already, I saw an essay about it that galvanized me to crack it open - and sometimes I have absolutely no idea.
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