![]() ![]() ![]() Depression is relieved by Holleran’s grim wit and by flashes of sanctity from aboveįorget about Florida as the home of Disney World, Tupperware and Donald Trump: here, the state is death’s antechamber. But the coital bouts on the screen only worsen his boredom, as the performers take so long to reach orgasm that “watching them is like waiting for a bus”. Otherwise, he spends his days viewing porn, which he likens to the miserable games of solitaire played by his dying father. Sex for the narrator consists of occasional blowjobs administered to unattractive strangers, in sessions that amount to what the Catholic church defines as corporeal acts of mercy. The sand that spreads through the drought-stricken setting of the new novel is a morbid symptom, warning that the planet, trashed by our “manufacturing mania”, may soon be uninhabitable. ![]() The arid corner of Florida in which he is beached might be a parody of Fire Island, the sandbar off Long Island where the characters of Dancer from the Dance alternately sun themselves on the shore and couple, triple or quadruple in the dunes. Now, in The Kingdom of Sand, a nameless narrator, deputising for the near-octogenarian Holleran, soberly contemplates what Christian eschatology calls the last things. ![]()
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