Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
Published 1978 · 69,575 words · about 6 hours at an average pace
How hard is Dancer from the Dance to read?
Dancer from the Dance scores 63 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Elevated, mannered, sometimes deliberately purple.
- Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
- Long, lyrical, heavily cadenced sentences.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Concrete nightlife carrying an argument about beauty and waste.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Light on incident, rich in atmosphere.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- A letter-writing frame around a narrator who idolises his subject.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- The dance floor and the summer house are sustained figures.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- Steady distance between the narrator's romanticism and the life described.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The ending leaves Malone's fate deliberately unresolved.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- An epistolary frame around a third-person novel.
How Dancer from the Dance is regarded
Dancer from the Dance holds a literary regard score of 63 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.