From Amazon
Interview with Alan Hollinghurst 
Alan Hollinghurst's extraordinarily rich novel The Line of Beauty. has garnered a new level of acclaim for the author after winning the 2004 Man Booker Prize. Hollinghurst speaks about his work in our interview.
From Publishers Weekly
Among its other wonders, this almost perfectly written novel, recently longlisted for the Man Booker, delineates what's arguably the most coruscating portrait of a plutocracy since Goya painted the Spanish Bourbons. To shade in the nuances of class, Hollingsworth uses plot the way it was meant to be used—not as a line of utility, but as a thematically connected sequence of events that creates its own mini-value system and symbols.The book is divided into three sections, dated 1983, 1986 and 1987. The protagonist, Nick Guest, is a James scholar in the making and a tripper in the fast gay culture of the time. The first section shows Nick moving into the Notting Hill mansion of Gerald Fedden, one of Thatcher's Tory MPs, at the request of the minister's son, Toby, Nick's all-too-straight Oxford crush. Nick becomes Toby's sister Catherine's confidante, securing his place in the house, and loses his virginity spectacularly to Leo, a black council worker. The next section jumps the reader ahead to a more sophisticated Nick. Leo has dropped out of the picture; cocaine, three-ways and another Oxford alum, the sinisterly alluring, wealthy Lebanese Wani Ouradi, have taken his place. Nick is dimly aware of running too many risks with Wani, and becomes accidentally aware that Gerald is running a few, too. Disaster comes in 1987, with a media scandal that engulfs Gerald and then entangles Nick. While Hollinghurst's story has the true feel of Jamesian drama, it is the authorial intelligence illuminating otherwise trivial pieces of story business so as to make them seem alive and mysteriously significant that gives the most pleasure. This is Nick coming home for the first and only time with the closeted Leo: "there were two front doors set side by side in the shallow recess of the porch. Leo applied himself to the right hand one, and it was one of those locks that require tender probings and tuggings, infinitesimal withdrawals, to get the key to turn." This novel has the air of a classic.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Hollinghurst's first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), won major acclaim and many awards. His latest novel engages similar themes--a young man new to both his sexuality and the manners of high society. Set in London during the early 1980s, the economy is booming, the Tories have just been swept into power, Margaret Thatcher is prime minister, and the country is awash in hope and excitement. Nick Guest, fresh out of Oxford, is staying in London with the Fedden family--whose son, Toby, was Nick's dearest friend at Oxford. The father, Gerald, is a newly elected conservative member of parliament and is infatuated with Thatcher, whom he calls "the Lady." Nick, by his proximity to the Feddens, attends swank parties, packed with MPs, cabinet ministers, and nobility, all of whom harbor the expectation that "the Lady" might appear at any minute. Meanwhile, Nick embarks on two love affairs--first with Leo, a young black London clerk, and later with Wani, a Lebanese millionaire and friend from Oxford. After nights of parties, drugs, sex, and snobbery, scandal--in which Nick plays an unwilling part-- visits the Fedden family. The material and social excesses of the 1980s are deftly portrayed in Hollinghurst's latest success. Michael Spinella
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
W.H. Auden concluded his 1941 poem “At the Grave of Henry James” with this stanza:
All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers, living or dead:
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling, make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.
Like Auden, Nick Guest, the protagonist of Allan Hollinghurst’s Man Booker-winning novel The Line of Beauty, loves the work of Henry James. Hollinghurst’s book-his fourth novel-often adopts a satirical inflection, and confirms by its allegiance to this critical mode Auden’s conviction that all will be judged. Yet Hollinghurst’s hero, Guest, also cites James in such a way that the entire project of satire is called into question: “to call something vulgar was to fail to give a proper account of it.” In The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst portrays various kinds of vulgarity, not just the vulgarity of Margaret Thatcher’s Tories-whose flaws he incidentally never depicts as uniform, inhuman or comprehensive. He supplements his occasionally facile satire with “a proper account,” and reveals the simultaneous applicability and illegitimacy of satire on almost every page. True satire expresses a kind of love. The artistic longing to perpetuate what arouses tenacious feeling characteristically compromises the satirist’s motive of reform. An aesthete such as Nick Guest (an antique dealer’s son) cannot help loving the rich, whoever they may be, because in spite of their follies they are the ones who can afford to collect and preserve the radiant works of the past. A connoisseur knows that, without exception, the masterpieces that he or she cherishes emerged in societies inextricably glorious and corrupt. The satirist Hollinghurst, who delights in beauty and who celebrates, moreover, every function of the male body, inevitably descends more from Petronius Arbiter than from Jonathan Swift. Nick Guest-his name signals his impermanent position-attaches himself to the affluent Fedden family through its son Toby. Gerald Fedden, Toby’s father, is a Tory MP.
The Line of Beauty recalls by title a phrase from a 1753 treatise by William Hogarth. What this reference to Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty may imply for Hollinghurst and his hero Nick Guest is the impossible but persistent coherence of the contemptible with the lovely. The serpentine line-the “line of beauty” that Hogarth extolled in his book-exists only by virtue of its contrast with other, less distinguished graphic phenomena. Despite his serious interest in conceptualizing beauty, Hogarth is remembered today as a satirist, celebrated for admonitory prints such as “The Rake’s Progress.” Nick Guest’s eventual lover Antoine (“Wani”) Ouradi, born to wealth, undergoes degradations that parallel the decline of Hogarth’s Tom Rakewell, though Wani, heir to a grocery-outlet fortune, never forfeits his financial advantages. By the end of Hollinghurst’s novel, dissoluteness has advanced so far that the line of beauty-Nick Guest’s lodestar-becomes confused, and even continuous, with lines of addictive cocaine. Hogarth’s eighteenth-century prints document extravagance and disease. At the same time, they remain testimonies of beauty, manifesting among other things the serpentine line that Hogarth and Nick Guest concur in identifying as the elemental, persuasive expression of the aesthetic. Another emblem for the world that Hollinghurst animates is the leather-bound copy of Joseph Addison’s Poems and Plays in which Nick and Wani conceal their stash of coke. Thus the refined casing of neo-classical civilization masks expensive delinquencies. That was true in the 1980s; it was no less true in the eighteenth century.
Hollinghurst’s novel opens in 1983. For those of approximately Hollinghurst’s generation, the period evokes involuntary nostalgia-involuntary because the past as such compulsively awakens nostalgia, regardless of what comprised its repertoire of events. Nick Guest must listen, like the rest of his cohort, to Boy George and Sting. But in Hollinghurst’s England (as in North America), 1983 also represents an epidemiological divide. W.H. Auden once composed a resounding line: “We must love one another or die.” Out of subsequent scruple, Auden amended the line to read: “We must love one another and die.” Defending his revision, Auden argued that love, however sincere or redemptive, does not exempt us from mortality. In the 1980s, Auden’s apercu became literal when AIDS made its appearance. In this illness, the physical expression of love and ineluctable death coincide. Nick Guest comes of age as a gay man at just this moment.
Portraying the psyche, society and actions of a young man who prefers men, Hollinghurst touches on profundity. This is all the more remarkable given that Hollinghurst’s protagonist light-heartedly imagines characterizing himself as “the sort of guy who likes Pope more than Wordsworth.” Such a remark seems to align Nick Guest with Alexander Pope’s Augustan artifice rather than with Wordsworthian reverie. Yet Hollinghurst renders the love of men for men quite natural. In fact, Hollinghurst’s aetiology of eros takes Wordsworthian rather than Popean form: Nick Guest specializes in articulating significant “spots of time.” For example, midway through The Line of Beauty, Nick goes swimming in an extensive outdoor pool: “He had the sense of something fleeting and harmonic, longed for and repeated-it was the circling trees, perhaps, and the silver water, the embrace of a solitary childhood, and the need to be pulled up into a waiting circle of men.” The men in question, all of them lovers of men, are floating on a raft. This precarious image of endangered intimacy and solidarity captures the determinants and conditions of their love.
Hollinghurst depicts Nick Guest’s first affair with finesse. Young Nick is self-centred, self-conscious, not deeply admirable. Nick’s lover is Leo Charles. Leo isn’t rich, isn’t as well educated as Nick. Hollinghurst conveys a sense of the opportunity and limitation of Leo’s life through the medium of his racing bicycle. This bicycle may stand for a number of things: the dream of cruising light-weight through the world; the slender, decisive essence of what divides Leo from his Christian mother; the propensity of people to dote on favourite objects more than on their fellow human beings; the repository of aesthetic feeling for a man who is not, in any conventional sense, an aesthete; the stylish image of gay love (or of love as such), solitary and dual at one and the same time; the shiny instrument of flight so frail that it is forever vulnerable to being baulked.
The bicycle becomes like a heroic epithet, inseparable from any evocation of Leo: “And there the bike was, refined, weightless, priceless, the bike of the future, shackled to the nearest lamp-post”; “He led Leo … the bike bouncing beside them, controlled only by a hand on its saddle-it seemed to quiver and explore just ahead of them”; “Leo sat on the bike, one foot straight down like a dancer’s to the pavement, the other in the raised stirrup. A kind of envy that Nick had felt all evening for the bike and its untouchable place in Leo’s heart fused with a new resentment of it and of the ease with which it would take him away.” The later love of Nick and Wani Ouradi adopts a more harrowing adjunct. As a surface for preparing lines of cocaine, the lovers use a Georgian desk that at last is indelibly “marked with drink stains and razor etchings.” Leo has a bike, but Wani possesses an impressive car. Cars provoke Nick’s sorrowful reflection: “at first they were possibilities made solid and fast, agents of dreams that kept a glint of dreams about them, a keen narcotic smell; then slowly they disclosed their unguessed quaintness and clumsiness, they seemed to fade into dim disgrace between one fashion and another.”
The end of Hollinghurst’s novel presents Nick expelled from the scandal-rocked Fedden household-imagery of gates and of keyholders has recurred throughout the story, and now the doors appear to have locked firmly behind him. Desolate, Nick harbours the unproven intuition that, like his lover Wani, he will test positive for HIV. “He felt,” we are told, “that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity. It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional.” For all of Hollinghurst’s satire, love prevails-or satire itself enhances love. The reader cares about Nick, and hopes that the test comes back negative.
Eric Miller (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
"Alan Hollinghurst writes harsh but deeply informed social satire from within, just as Proust did ... He brings the eloquence of a George Eliot together with the sexiness and visual acuity of a Nabokov." -- Edmund White
"In Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Line of Beauty, the great tradition of English public, political narrative, as perfected by Trollope, meets the sculpted, poetic and interior narrative as perfected by Henry James. The result is intriguing, like reading gossip in beautifully made sentences with extraordinary insights into motive and nuance, allowing all the time for comedy." -- Colm Toibin, Guardian
"The best English novel of the year so far is Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty." -- Zadie Smith, Guardian
"This is an exceptionally strong shortlist ... In a strong field these novels have stood out as being truly remarkable." -- Rt. Hon Chris Smith MP, Chair of the Man Booker Prize Judges; The Line of Beauty shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2004
All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers, living or dead:
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling, make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.
Like Auden, Nick Guest, the protagonist of Allan Hollinghurst’s Man Booker-winning novel The Line of Beauty, loves the work of Henry James. Hollinghurst’s book-his fourth novel-often adopts a satirical inflection, and confirms by its allegiance to this critical mode Auden’s conviction that all will be judged. Yet Hollinghurst’s hero, Guest, also cites James in such a way that the entire project of satire is called into question: “to call something vulgar was to fail to give a proper account of it.” In The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst portrays various kinds of vulgarity, not just the vulgarity of Margaret Thatcher’s Tories-whose flaws he incidentally never depicts as uniform, inhuman or comprehensive. He supplements his occasionally facile satire with “a proper account,” and reveals the simultaneous applicability and illegitimacy of satire on almost every page. True satire expresses a kind of love. The artistic longing to perpetuate what arouses tenacious feeling characteristically compromises the satirist’s motive of reform. An aesthete such as Nick Guest (an antique dealer’s son) cannot help loving the rich, whoever they may be, because in spite of their follies they are the ones who can afford to collect and preserve the radiant works of the past. A connoisseur knows that, without exception, the masterpieces that he or she cherishes emerged in societies inextricably glorious and corrupt. The satirist Hollinghurst, who delights in beauty and who celebrates, moreover, every function of the male body, inevitably descends more from Petronius Arbiter than from Jonathan Swift. Nick Guest-his name signals his impermanent position-attaches himself to the affluent Fedden family through its son Toby. Gerald Fedden, Toby’s father, is a Tory MP.
The Line of Beauty recalls by title a phrase from a 1753 treatise by William Hogarth. What this reference to Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty may imply for Hollinghurst and his hero Nick Guest is the impossible but persistent coherence of the contemptible with the lovely. The serpentine line-the “line of beauty” that Hogarth extolled in his book-exists only by virtue of its contrast with other, less distinguished graphic phenomena. Despite his serious interest in conceptualizing beauty, Hogarth is remembered today as a satirist, celebrated for admonitory prints such as “The Rake’s Progress.” Nick Guest’s eventual lover Antoine (“Wani”) Ouradi, born to wealth, undergoes degradations that parallel the decline of Hogarth’s Tom Rakewell, though Wani, heir to a grocery-outlet fortune, never forfeits his financial advantages. By the end of Hollinghurst’s novel, dissoluteness has advanced so far that the line of beauty-Nick Guest’s lodestar-becomes confused, and even continuous, with lines of addictive cocaine. Hogarth’s eighteenth-century prints document extravagance and disease. At the same time, they remain testimonies of beauty, manifesting among other things the serpentine line that Hogarth and Nick Guest concur in identifying as the elemental, persuasive expression of the aesthetic. Another emblem for the world that Hollinghurst animates is the leather-bound copy of Joseph Addison’s Poems and Plays in which Nick and Wani conceal their stash of coke. Thus the refined casing of neo-classical civilization masks expensive delinquencies. That was true in the 1980s; it was no less true in the eighteenth century.
Hollinghurst’s novel opens in 1983. For those of approximately Hollinghurst’s generation, the period evokes involuntary nostalgia-involuntary because the past as such compulsively awakens nostalgia, regardless of what comprised its repertoire of events. Nick Guest must listen, like the rest of his cohort, to Boy George and Sting. But in Hollinghurst’s England (as in North America), 1983 also represents an epidemiological divide. W.H. Auden once composed a resounding line: “We must love one another or die.” Out of subsequent scruple, Auden amended the line to read: “We must love one another and die.” Defending his revision, Auden argued that love, however sincere or redemptive, does not exempt us from mortality. In the 1980s, Auden’s apercu became literal when AIDS made its appearance. In this illness, the physical expression of love and ineluctable death coincide. Nick Guest comes of age as a gay man at just this moment.
Portraying the psyche, society and actions of a young man who prefers men, Hollinghurst touches on profundity. This is all the more remarkable given that Hollinghurst’s protagonist light-heartedly imagines characterizing himself as “the sort of guy who likes Pope more than Wordsworth.” Such a remark seems to align Nick Guest with Alexander Pope’s Augustan artifice rather than with Wordsworthian reverie. Yet Hollinghurst renders the love of men for men quite natural. In fact, Hollinghurst’s aetiology of eros takes Wordsworthian rather than Popean form: Nick Guest specializes in articulating significant “spots of time.” For example, midway through The Line of Beauty, Nick goes swimming in an extensive outdoor pool: “He had the sense of something fleeting and harmonic, longed for and repeated-it was the circling trees, perhaps, and the silver water, the embrace of a solitary childhood, and the need to be pulled up into a waiting circle of men.” The men in question, all of them lovers of men, are floating on a raft. This precarious image of endangered intimacy and solidarity captures the determinants and conditions of their love.
Hollinghurst depicts Nick Guest’s first affair with finesse. Young Nick is self-centred, self-conscious, not deeply admirable. Nick’s lover is Leo Charles. Leo isn’t rich, isn’t as well educated as Nick. Hollinghurst conveys a sense of the opportunity and limitation of Leo’s life through the medium of his racing bicycle. This bicycle may stand for a number of things: the dream of cruising light-weight through the world; the slender, decisive essence of what divides Leo from his Christian mother; the propensity of people to dote on favourite objects more than on their fellow human beings; the repository of aesthetic feeling for a man who is not, in any conventional sense, an aesthete; the stylish image of gay love (or of love as such), solitary and dual at one and the same time; the shiny instrument of flight so frail that it is forever vulnerable to being baulked.
The bicycle becomes like a heroic epithet, inseparable from any evocation of Leo: “And there the bike was, refined, weightless, priceless, the bike of the future, shackled to the nearest lamp-post”; “He led Leo … the bike bouncing beside them, controlled only by a hand on its saddle-it seemed to quiver and explore just ahead of them”; “Leo sat on the bike, one foot straight down like a dancer’s to the pavement, the other in the raised stirrup. A kind of envy that Nick had felt all evening for the bike and its untouchable place in Leo’s heart fused with a new resentment of it and of the ease with which it would take him away.” The later love of Nick and Wani Ouradi adopts a more harrowing adjunct. As a surface for preparing lines of cocaine, the lovers use a Georgian desk that at last is indelibly “marked with drink stains and razor etchings.” Leo has a bike, but Wani possesses an impressive car. Cars provoke Nick’s sorrowful reflection: “at first they were possibilities made solid and fast, agents of dreams that kept a glint of dreams about them, a keen narcotic smell; then slowly they disclosed their unguessed quaintness and clumsiness, they seemed to fade into dim disgrace between one fashion and another.”
The end of Hollinghurst’s novel presents Nick expelled from the scandal-rocked Fedden household-imagery of gates and of keyholders has recurred throughout the story, and now the doors appear to have locked firmly behind him. Desolate, Nick harbours the unproven intuition that, like his lover Wani, he will test positive for HIV. “He felt,” we are told, “that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity. It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional.” For all of Hollinghurst’s satire, love prevails-or satire itself enhances love. The reader cares about Nick, and hopes that the test comes back negative.
Eric Miller (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
"Alan Hollinghurst writes harsh but deeply informed social satire from within, just as Proust did ... He brings the eloquence of a George Eliot together with the sexiness and visual acuity of a Nabokov." -- Edmund White
"In Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Line of Beauty, the great tradition of English public, political narrative, as perfected by Trollope, meets the sculpted, poetic and interior narrative as perfected by Henry James. The result is intriguing, like reading gossip in beautifully made sentences with extraordinary insights into motive and nuance, allowing all the time for comedy." -- Colm Toibin, Guardian
"The best English novel of the year so far is Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty." -- Zadie Smith, Guardian
"This is an exceptionally strong shortlist ... In a strong field these novels have stood out as being truly remarkable." -- Rt. Hon Chris Smith MP, Chair of the Man Booker Prize Judges; The Line of Beauty shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2004
Book Description
Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize
From the acclaimed author of The Swimming-Pool Library, a sweeping novel about class and sex and money that brings Thatcher's London alive.
From the acclaimed author of The Swimming-Pool Library, a sweeping novel about class and sex and money that brings Thatcher's London alive.
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby--whom Nick had idolized at Oxford--and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.
As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.
About the Author
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of The Swimming-Pool Library, The Spell and The Folding Star, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He currently teaches at Princeton.
From AudioFile
Nick is a Jamesian scholar, obsessed with aesthetic beauty, who is coming of age against the backdrop of Thatcher-era England. He's an outsider--gay, living with the wealthy family of an Oxford mate whose father, Gerald, is a Tory MP--and often doesn't engage with the world around him so much as observe it. Alex Jennings's smooth, pleasant voice easily conveys Nick's internal observations, as well as all the class distinctions of a large cast of British characters--Gerald's upper-crust brusqueness; decadent Wani's lazy drawl; the Caribbean-tinged accent of Leo, Nick's first male lover. Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning novel is compelling, and Jennings navigates the waters of national, personal, and sexual politics with ease. J.M.D. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
