The Line of Beauty

I'm reading the novel for which Alan Hollinghurst won the Man Booker prize in 2004.  I read his first novel last year, but I'm finding this one much more readable.

From a review: "At 400-plus pages sprinkled with references to Henry James, his fourth outing aspires to the status of an epic about sex, politics, money, and high society. Though he's best known for his elegant descriptions of gay male life and pitch-perfect prose, Hollinghurst is most striking here for his successful, often damning, observations about the vast divides between the ruling class and everyone else."

Yep.  It's the subtle Jamesian social observations channeled through a somewhat naive, self-centered, and ethically unmoored character that make it fascinating.

Hollinghurst wrote of it:

"In the case of The Line of Beauty, the narrative germ was accompanied by a dreamlike perspective of Kensington Park Gardens, a street that, when I first lived in London in 1981, I walked along several times a week on my way to swim at a local baths, and whose imposing houses, rather scruffier then than now, made me wonder about the lives led in them –it was all a part of my romantic sense of London as a scene of infinite possibilities, both real and fictional."

In this discussion of his work, he also discusses the impact of AIDS on the writing of The Swimming Pool Library from 1984 through 1987 (just as ACT UP was forming in NY).  In The Line of Beauty, the protagonist, Nick, comes of age as a gay man starting in 1983, and what the the reader knows about AIDS casts a shadow on his choices.  Sex, drugs, politics, class, race, and even gender in a more subtle way (with Nick very focused on observing men), it's all tightly entwined.

Hollinghurst also wrote, "My whole instinct was to work by irony, and to make the world of money and power that young Nick Guest is drawn to absorb him and then expel him, as if from some phony paradise.  Nick was to be an unpolitical person in an age reconfigured by a political revolution."

This jibes with an astute online review that labeled TLOB a reverse bildungsroman similar to Maurice, where coming of age as a gay man leads to exclusion from society.  In other words, a ghetto novel in the disguise of a study of the ruling class from a gay POV.  Or something.  An interesting angle, definitely, with very compelling prose.