Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11233 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.
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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

Maggie, Charlie, and the Boys
The effusive press comments quoted on the cover and flyleaf of the paperback edition of Alan Hollinghurst's THE LINE OF BEAUTY are totally correct in everything they actually say; they merely fail to mention one of the most important aspects of the book. Hollinghurst writes brilliantly about life among the movers and shakers of Margaret Thatcher's London in the early 1980s. His ability to portray his characters, as one critic puts it, "from just an inch to the left" of how they would see themselves is masterly, and the result is something like the portraits of Goya, a flattering likeness with just a hint of satire. Hollinghurst has perfect pitch when it comes to the social sensibilities and small hypocrisies of the well-bred. As a lineal descendant of Trollope, James, and Forster, he is a well-deserved winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

But none of the reviews quoted in the book mention the gay sex, which is pervasive and often explicitly physical. By portraying the narrator of the book, Nick Guest, as a gay man in an ostensibly straight world, Hollinghurst achieves an oblique angle on the people he observes, moving considerably more than an inch from the axis on which they would ideally see themselves. The glamorous life is glimpsed through a foreground that straight readers might find far from glamorous, especially when it deals with bodily interactions. Ultimately, this becomes essential to the plot, but for a long time it seems merely an authorial device. It is difficult to know whether the author sees these elements as a heightening of the sexual charge, or whether they are deliberately introduced as an antidote to romanticism, and as much an emblem of decadence as the increasingly frequent use of "charlie" (cocaine) by the narrator and his friends. Certainly, the secrecy practised by other characters in the story who have not come out as Nick has done, does seem to point up the falsity of the world in which they cannot admit their preferences.

Not that Nick needs the difference in sexuality to give him detachment. He is presented as a talented boy from a middle-class background who has made some upper-crust friends while at Oxford, so becomes a kind of permanent guest in their lives after college. [This has much in common with my own background, and it was a curious experience to find one of my own Oxbridge friends of this kind, not named but clearly identifiable, appearing as a minor character in the book!] While Nick is clearly thrilled to have been adopted into this world, he remains subtly an outsider, but with an acuteness of perception to compensate for his lack of belonging. His social position is not so very different from that of Kazuo Ichiguro's hero in the first part of WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS -- a peculiarly English awkwardness which both writers capture very well.

The title, THE LINE OF BEAUTY, comes from Hogarth, and refers to the particular elegance of an ogival double-curve. It is emblematic of the genuine aesthetic understanding that is Nick's most appealing quality for this particular reader; the passages talking about art, literature, and music are perceptive and beautifully written. But art is also seen as the province of the rich, who can afford it but don't necessarily appreciate it. As the book goes on, there is increasing emphasis on art objects in a mannerist or rococo phase, seen surely as symbols of decadence, where art is "just make-believe for rich people," as one of the characters says. But the phrase also stands for that fatal line of attraction that leads from one love object to another, or towards some ideal of the beautiful life, that comes crashing down on the characters' heads at the end of this social comedy which turns out to have been a tragedy after all.

Hollinghurst, the keen observer
"The Line of Beauty" is the first novel I've read by Alan Hollinghurst and having just finished it I'll make a beeline to read his others. Every chapter of this book is a sheer delight.

There are few authors who can move a book at such a torturedly slow pace and still manage a success. The key to "The Line of Beauty" lies in the detail....Hollinghurst unfolds his characters with enormous pathos, keeping their quotes brief and allowing his observations about them to become expanded. Their is a dryness to his writing that seems endemic of British authors but remaining in that style allows the flavor of his characters to come through with great shades of color.

As told through the eyes of the protagonist, Nick, Hollinghurst is able to steer him through a feel that combines an Edwardian England with the present. Nick grows up, to be sure, but he does so in a wafting way, sensitive to the world and his growing self-awareness. If Nick wears rose-colored glasses in the beginning, he has neatly discarded them at the end.

"The Line of Beauty" is really a book about connections...connections in a changing world of friends, lovers, family, illness and death. There is a general sadness that accompanies this book, as it should. Alan Hollinghurst reminds us, through the seriousness of Nick's story, how tenuous we all are in each other's care, no matter what our "standing" is in society... and how far we still have to go.

"He found himself yearning to know of their affairs"
When readers finish Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel, The Line of Beauty, they will easily see why it has just won the Booker Prize. Hollinghurst, in his previous novels has made a career out of portraying particular sides of gay life - the incessant partying, the drugs, the selfishness, the bitchiness, and the unremitting need for sex, as his characters search out desire in public toilets, bars, sex clubs, and late night clubs. Many of his characters - while candid and honest - have never been particularly likable, and the author's portrayal of them has often been far from flattering.

In the Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst continues with his hedonistic themes, but his scope is also much boarder and his canvas a lot larger. This is an exquisitely executed and scorchingly candid work, where Hollinghurst's characters are eclectic, funny and are a maddening assortment of people who are all restlessly trying to navigate their way through Margaret Thatcher's mid-eighties Britain where capitalism, opulence, and class envy reigned supreme.

The story begins in 1983 and centers on the young twenty-year-old Nick Guest as he becomes intertwined with the Fedden family and their luminous world of money and privilege. Gerald Fedden is a Tory Member of Parliament and is basking in the glory of Thatcher's economic policies; he lives with Rachel, his wife, and his two children, Catherine and Toby in a vast garden-filled estate called Kensington Park Gardens in Notting Hill. Nick studied with Toby, and has just come down from Oxford to London to distractingly do a doctorate on Henry James. While coming from a provincial, middle class background - his father is a humble antiques dealer - Nick is welcomed into the Fedden family like a type of surrogate son and over time, he becomes a kind of minder to the neurotic, troubled Catherine.

Nick enthusiastically partakes of the family's lavish parties and political dinners, and tries to impress them in their somewhat facile discussions on literature and art. He tries his best to promote civility amongst their affluent boredom, and entrusted with their secrets, he inevitably sketches their upper-class English ghastliness. But Nick's unsure of his footing in this opulent, affluent looking-glass world, and as he gazes hopefully into the gilt arch of the hall mirror, the young, distracted man finds the mirror reluctant to give its approval. Nick constantly has to remind himself that he is doing this all for pleasure.

When Nick meets Leo, a black cockney, after secretly answering a personal advertisement, the trusting, blushful, and unworldly virgin, is introduced to lusty sex and gay life. As a young man Nick feels the wrong kind of irony, the wrong knowledge for gay life, but later as he settles into his new family, a sense of security takes hold. A craving deepens in front of him and he discovers the "lovely teamwork of drugs and drink." Much of the later part of the novel involves his relationship with Wani, a long-lashed Lebanese millionaire playboy whose family represent the new, well-heeled class. While working as a creative consultant on Wani's new magazine, Ogee - named after the curve that is Hogarth's line of beauty - Nick is introduced to a world of non-stop threesomes, moneyed decadence, and cocaine-fueled days and nights.

Nicks life of excess builds to a virtuoso scene when Prime Minister Thatcher - who is referred to as "The Lady" and is much anticipated throughout the novel - finally attends a party at the Feddens' house. Wearing a bejeweled jacket that makes her look like a "country and western singer," she finds herself innocently dancing with a coked-up, out of it Nick. Nicks sumptuous life, however, soon takes a turn for the worst as dark secrets are unveiled and he eventually discovers the ruthlessness of his masters, the viciousness of class loyalty, and the ferocious homophobia of the Thatcherite Tories.

With a sly, feline wit, The Line of Beauty is undoubtedly Hollinghurst's finest, not only in the breadth of its ambition but also in its intricacies of observation and expression. He presents subtle interpretations of the world of those who think they are "born to rule" and his attention to drawing room dialogue is unsurpassed - there are lots of droll scenes where the author shows his flair for describing the tiniest social shenanigans. The novel is a rich, elegant and superb comedy of manners, and while never didactic, it's always ironic. Undoubtedly, The Line of Beauty is destined to become a giant masterpiece of modern literature. Mike Leonard November 04.