Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26141 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-17
• Released on: 2005-09-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.com Review

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.

From The New Yorker
"She is either Muse or she is nothing," Robert Graves wrote. After the Renaissance, the Greek goddesses of artistic inspiration were replaced by real—if idealized—women (think Dante and Beatrice). In these well-researched essays, Prose examines the lives of nine women who inspired some of history's most prominent artists and writers, including Samuel Johnson, Man Ray, and John Lennon. Nearly all these muse-artist relationships were distinguished by tragedy, and only five were sexually consummated; as Prose notes, "The power of longing is more durable than the thrill of possession." What emerges by the end of the book, oddly, is a case for the singularity of artistic influence: the author shows that Lewis Carroll's attachment to Alice Liddell was not at all like Nietzsche's sense of intellectual kinship with Lou Andreas-Salomé, nor was Yoko Ono's involvement with John Lennon as fruitful as Suzanne Farrell's with George Balanchine. The strongest essays here, on Liddell, Farrell, Ono, and Lee Miller (a Vogue model and photographer who posed for and worked with Man Ray), pointedly refute the notion that the role of the muse is a passive one, and offer in its place a complicated vision of the necessary contradictions of artistic life—including the desire for both feverish devotion and artistic independence, and a sense of the truth of beauty and the transience of it. Prose's broader conclusions about culture can seem hasty, but the book's achievement is its quiet reëvaluation of the received notion that genius is solitary in nature.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

On the Outside, Looking In
One of the biggest challenges of any novelist is to provide a perspective that's accessible to us and helpful in understanding what's being portrayed. Alan Hollinghurst has achieved remarkable results by stationing his narrator, Nick Guest, outside of all the worlds he inhabits. Guest is like a spirit rising amused over the action that can draw us a picture while recording every sound that's created or uttered.

Here are the worlds that Guest helps us explore:

-Tory MP life during the Thatcher years
-Young Oxford graduates looking for a place
-A young man exploring his homosexuality
-Wealthy British on the make for more
-Middle-aged married life
-Inner life of a young manic-depressive

The book's overall theme is about everyday hypocrisy and the large price that has to be paid by those who pretend to be other than what they are and believe.

The story evolves in three time periods: 1983, 1986, and 1987. In all three years, Nick Guest resides with the family of an Oxford friend where the father is a rising conservative MP. Nick has an unofficial role as low-cost lodger to keep on eye on the friend's troubled sister. The family knows that Nick is looking for a boy friend and is open about accepting his sexuality. The three years give us a chance to learn more about the characters and to see how their relationships change. The 1987 period brings all that had been known in private into public with large consequences for all.

The book is filled with great scenes where nuances of knowledge, awareness, perception, accent, and perspective separate and unite the characters. Often, contrasting scenes occur back-to-back so that the contrasts are even more obvious. You'll gain a deeper insight into British society than you could on your own.

Ultimately, I feel that a work of fiction must be judged by how successfully it takes you into a world you have never been in before and allows you to understand that world much better. Any novel that can help me understand what it's like to be gay during the AIDS epidemic while giving me a strong sense of Thatcher's leadership has to be pretty terrific because those dimensions are outside my experience and normal reading.

As a person who enjoys art, I was most impressed by the way that the ogee was worked into the story to provide a connecting metaphor for our common humanity.

Bravo!

Life among the plutocrats.
On one level, this exquisitely wrought novel is a social satire -- a wickedly frank view of the monetarily and politically privileged in Thatcher-era England as seen through the eyes of an insider Outsider. On a more personal level, it might be called a tragedy of manners, the first-person account of an all-too-flawed (some might say parasitic) hero whose hubris is his desire to belong. The rather too obviously named narrator, Nick Guest, seeks his place in the world among the sexually active homosexual set, the wealthy movers and shakers crowd, the aestheticist/intellectual exclusivists and the secret coterie of drug culture initiates. Nick's fall from grace stems from his careless disregard of the boundaries that separate them. AIDS, Margaret Thatcher, Henry James (Nick's thesis subject and literary godfather) and Cocaine are the spirits that reign over the proceedings, but they are not spirits who reside comfortably together.

Nick's sexual initiation with a lower-class black man takes place in the within the exclusive gated community where his hosts, the wealthy, politically ambitious Feddens, reside. Prophetically, this relationship is consummated in a chilly garden, the participants warmed by the compost heap they use for leverage. Sexual prowess and, later, drug use lead Nick to carelessness, blurring his sense of propriety. And although drugs and sex are the great equalizers that allow Nick entree into the world of his social betters, they ultimately bring about his expulsion from Society. Everything he desires, either betrays him or is betrayed by him. His college mate's family, of which he so desperately wants to be a member, actually regards him as a servant, the sister's keeper (a position at which he finally, catastrophically fails). His first lover casts him aside without explanation and his long-term partner, the stunningly handsome, wealthier-than-is good-for-him Wani, is too drug-addled and promiscuous to be capable of real love and regards their relationship as one of sexual convenience. It is this relationship that will, in the end, prove to be the undoing of Nick and those he most admires.

Hollinghurst's themes are appropriately Jamesian: the dilemma of the artist in an artless society (Wani's money-worshipping, boorish father incessantly refers to Nick as "the aesthete"), and the clash between an independent innocent and a corrupt though attractive feudal establishment. Symbolic details are handled delicately and effectively as in the case of photographic references. Nick is disappointed when a photo of his crowning moment in Society, his dance with the Prime Minister, does not appear in the tabloids. When a photo of him is, in fact, published, it is the scandalous catalyst of his expulsion from that society. And, as he leaves his long-time residence, he comes across a snapshot of his sexually unavailable schoolmate, Toby, for love of whom he came to stay in the Fedden household in the first place. The photo shows a beautiful, sexually alluring Toby as he once appeared in a school play, but whose real-life, indolent subject has subsequently gone to fat.

Nothing is what one hopes it will be and all desire is betrayal. The line of beauty is only skin deep, leaving "The Line of Beauty" a lovely portrait of unlovely, ultimately unlovable people.

What a Beauty indeed.
In my estimation this will go down as one of the best pieces written in the English language this or any other century. I found the charaters believable and highly entertaining. I would imagine that many, many people, particularly gay men, would find Nick to be alot like themselves. I wanted to keep going back to the book, night after night as I was entranced with the story and the characters. Well written and thought provoking, what a beauty indeed.