The Folding Star [Paperback]

Alan Hollinghurst is certainly a crafty wordsmith. This book is beautifully written.

The story is basically that of an aging gay male becoming obsessed with his beautiful young student. Edward Manners becomes the tutor for a wealthy high school aged fellow, Luc. At first Edward sees a thin immature youth but as the story progresses, Edward becomes more obsessed with Luc and the descriptions of Luc change to match Edward's changing perception. This portion of the story is well told and certainly accurately portrays the process of obsession that seduces gradually, obliterating common sense and good judgement.

Edward recognizes that he has lost his bearings when he finds himself continually thinking about Luc, spying on him when he is on holiday with his friends, imagining him having sex with other young men or women, remaining fixated as to whether Luc is gay or straight, and even leaving tutoring sessions to use the bathroom so that he can smell Luc's dirty laundry.

Hollinghurst then begins to break the bubbles or desire that Edward has created. Luc becomes more realistic and less idealized. He becomes more human and more mundane. Eventually all the questions Edward has about Luc are answered, or at least many of the questions are answered. Edward begins the painful process of healing the wounds left by obsession as Luc drifts out of his life.

I found the book to be one of the best descriptions of the natural history of obsession since Robert Plant's The Catholic. Obsession is revealed to be a wounding, out of mind experience, from which we only gradually recover. Hollingshurst caught it well in this well written book.

If you read Hollinghurst's first novel THE SWIMMING POOL LIBRARY, you know that the excellence of his writing puts him more in a tradition with the likes of such masters as George Eliot, Henry James and E.M. Forster than in the tradition of contemporary gay fiction, no matter how boldly graphic some of his moments might be. But whereas SWIMMING POOL LIBRARY is a breakneck tale of reckless, amoral and privileged youth before AIDS, THE FOLDING STAR is in some ways its spiritual successor - its mid30s protagonist has experienced enough loss (of his father, several friends, a first love) to have shed the certainty and arrogance that characterized the first book's young subject, and has fled his English hometown to a small unnamed city in Belgium where he becomes the tutor of two high school boys, one of whom, Luc Altidore, the subject of a previous mysterious "scandal," becomes his obsession. But as in LOLITA, the obsession is as sad as it is perverse, reflecting back more on Edward's (the protag.) receding youth and present aimlessness than on the attributes of the boy himself, who, like Lolita, is revealed coyly and only half outside the shadow of Edward's own projections. Midway through the story, Edward goes home for the funeral of an old friend and boyhood lover; this is where Hollinghurst conjures all of Edward's past in a half-dream of recollections (one of which reveals the haunting source of the book's cryptic title), and when Edward returns to Belgium for the astonishing final third of the book, the reader is finally able to look at his present rudderlessness as sequel to a past too stiflingly rich in memories. Indeed, THE FOLDING STAR seems less a meditation on erotic obsession than it does on memory and loss, all its memories of emotional and sexual awakening evoked in such beautifully spectral terms that by the end the book's real fetish seems to be the past itself -- a distinctly British, Wordsworthian past where people, hills, even stars become the repositories of memories almost too precious to express aloud. If THE SWIMMING POOL LIBRARY was a fast and shocking read, THE FOLDING STAR is thoughtful and melancholy - but I'm hard pressed to think of a late 20th century writer who depicts both the outer world and the inner life in prose as exquisite and moving as Hollinghurst

THE FOLDING STAR is a sprawling neo-Victorian achievement, full of memorable characters, breathtaking description, and graphic gay sex. At its surface the novel is the story of Edward Manners - a 40ish, drinky, and rather raunchy former academic who relocates to a small Belgian town to work as a tutor. Almost at once Edward becomes infatuated with Luc, a student. His obsession is comic, tragic, and romantic. With this as its core THE FOLDING STAR then begins to reveal a much deeper and more complex reality. The interconnectedness of various lives and histories soon begins to become apparent, with former details gaining greater significance and literary relief in this engrossing epic of obsession and taboo. This is a wonderful book though I found it a bit dry and somewhat cold...it was a book to admire rather than embrace.