Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!
- Matthew 7:24-27

It’s universally recognized that building on sand, literal or metaphorical, is not a good idea, and here Holleran seems to suggest that he or his protagonist, depending on how much of this book is memoir, has regrettably discovered that he has done just that (while living in sandy Florida, widely recognized itself as “not a good idea”).

The protagonist of this linked collection of stories is someone who seems to have built his personal foundation on things that tend to fall away with the passage of time: youth, sex appeal, one’s parents. Bereft of them he feels lonely and isolated, carrying on living in his parents’ house in Florida surrounded by their belongings (usually a bad idea, isn’t it?). He’s afraid of approaching death, and of dying alone. He’d like to find relief from his anxieties in sex with attractive younger people, but that doesn’t often work out anymore.

Those are the themes; in structure the book is not entirely convincingly linked stories, reflections and ruminations largely, that read an awful lot like memoir. Some passages are repeated among them which creates a feeling that this wasn’t too well edited when it was assembled together. The prose is a sort of well written stream of consciousness light on plot. Sometimes funny, intentionally or not - “I can see the glow of blue and green lights, the two most satisfying Christmas colors, no doubt because they are so melancholy” he writes, which I’m not sure is supposed to be funny but struck me as, and is a fine example of the book’s tone. ( )

Andrew Holleran brought his goodwill as an iconic gay writer to the first half of The Kingdom of Sand. But without a plot, I lost interested as I dragged myself to the end. ( )

That's how you know you've been in Florida too long — you no longer go to the beach.

The narrator of this book is a typical Holleran figure, a single gay man rather cut off from the humdrum provincial world around him. He has moved to a small town in northern Florida to look after his elderly parents and has somehow stuck there long after their deaths, well on his way into old age himself.

He can't find any good reason to be there: his parents' old neighbours are all gone, whatever natural attractions the region might have had once have all been destroyed by human activity, the cruising zones at the video store and the boat ramp are rarely frequented by anyone under sixty, and his only local gay friend, Earl, with whom he watches old movies once or twice a week, is well over eighty. The town isn't even convenient for shopping or airports. Yet he's somehow unable to bring himself to throw out his parents' stuff and sell up the house. Moving seems to carry an even greater threat of lonely old age than staying put. Maybe the only solution is Earl's strategy of putting himself in the hands of a fortune-hunting paid carer?

It's perhaps somehow ironic that Holleran, who started his career by celebrating the gay community's cult of youth and beauty, is the writer who now feels it his duty to warn us what happens to you in the end if you allow that aesthetic to become the sole basis on which you let love and companionship into your life. He's almost at the point of agreeing with our parents when they regretted how sad it was that we wouldn't have any children to look after us in old age.

Not a cheerful book, but near enough to the real lives of plenty of people I know that it can't be dismissed as unduly pessimistic. This is what old age is about for a lot of people: not just gay men. ( )