Miami Herald // The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Bloomsbury. 438 pages. $24.95
Nick searches for beauty in the Thatcher era
The author captures the times perfectly and proves himself a natural talent, even if he's not quite Henry James.
By Andrew Ervin
The Line of Beauty, winner of this year's prestigious Man Booker Prize, comes across as a 400-page seance intended to channel the spirit of Henry James. In doing so it signifies Alan Hollinghurst's membership in the James Gang, that cabal of youngish authors determined to invoke the early-modernist master and, in some sense, pretend that postmodernism was little more than a bad dream.
As in James' best yarns, the pointillist attention to detail makes every character fascinating, even those relegated to the background. It's a magnificent feat considering how wonderfully shallow and vacant they are. The aesthete Nick Guest, a James scholar, lives with an Oxford classmate, Toby Fedden, and his upper crust family. Toby's father, Gerald, is a Tory MP with a healthy share of improprieties hidden under his cummerbund and the daughter, Cat, suffers from manic depression and has a history of trying to hurt herself.
Nick lusts after Toby, but his affections aren't reciprocated, so over the span of the novel he engages in two major love affairs. First he falls in love with a working-class Jamaican directly affected by and disenfranchised with the policies of Gerald's government, and later with Wani, the closeted son of a wealthy Lebanese immigrant who benefits from the Thatcher regime's economic policies. Those two romances frame a complex tale of sterling manners and terrible decision-making.
The title derives from a quote by the English painter Hogarth, but Hollinghurst riffs on seemingly every connotation of the word ''line.'' His novel takes place in London during the swinging '80s, which means there's plenty of cocaine to go around. One of the book's many profound images appears when Nick's love of drugs and literature come crashing together as his lover cuts a few lines on a book cover.
''Wani was working painstakingly and a little defensively with his gold card, making rapid hatching movements to and fro across the partially visible features of Henry James -- not the great bald Master but the quick-eyed, tender, brilliant twenty-year-old, with an irrepressible kink in his dark hair.'' Call it The Ambassadors meets Bright Lights, Big City.
In another richly ironic passage, our hero goes on a date to see the movie Scarface and is aghast to find it ''set in a Miami so violent and so opulent, so glittering and soulless, that Nick found himself worrying about how people survived in it, and then about how he would survive in it.'' That description could just as easily apply to his own London, but Nick is so blinded by the tony lifestyle he adopted that he's unable to envision any threat at all to his own existence, despite the lingering ''AIDS question'' of the time.
Hollinghurst successfully nails all the snobbery, casual racism and quasi-fascist conservatism of Thatcher-era high society, but insisting upon the comparison with James requires some serious guts. What goes missing are two of the things that made James James: intense, unflinching psychological insights and the ability to make an unpredictable series of events fall together in such a way as to make the plot feel wholly inevitable. Hollinghurst does manage to tie together enough seemingly random details and storylines to make the style of this novel and the substance absolutely indistinguishable. In doing so he achieves enough narrative depth to swallow the reader whole. And the sheen of the prose, particularly in the immaculate description of small detail, keeps us wired the whole way through.
'The double curve was Hogarth's `line of beauty,' the snakelike flicker of an instinct, of two compulsions held in one unfolding movement. He ran his hand down Wani's back. He didn't think Hogarth had illustrated the best example of it, the dip and swell -- he had chosen harps and branches, bones rather than flesh.''
On the basis of what he accomplishes word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence, Hollinghurst must be considered among the most naturally gifted talents we have today, one just now coming into his own. Amid the countless moments to savor and to linger over, it's easy to mistake The Line of Beauty for a masterpiece, if not something approaching the perfect novel.
Andrew Ervin is a writer in Champaign, Ill.
Nick searches for beauty in the Thatcher era
The author captures the times perfectly and proves himself a natural talent, even if he's not quite Henry James.
By Andrew Ervin
The Line of Beauty, winner of this year's prestigious Man Booker Prize, comes across as a 400-page seance intended to channel the spirit of Henry James. In doing so it signifies Alan Hollinghurst's membership in the James Gang, that cabal of youngish authors determined to invoke the early-modernist master and, in some sense, pretend that postmodernism was little more than a bad dream.
As in James' best yarns, the pointillist attention to detail makes every character fascinating, even those relegated to the background. It's a magnificent feat considering how wonderfully shallow and vacant they are. The aesthete Nick Guest, a James scholar, lives with an Oxford classmate, Toby Fedden, and his upper crust family. Toby's father, Gerald, is a Tory MP with a healthy share of improprieties hidden under his cummerbund and the daughter, Cat, suffers from manic depression and has a history of trying to hurt herself.
Nick lusts after Toby, but his affections aren't reciprocated, so over the span of the novel he engages in two major love affairs. First he falls in love with a working-class Jamaican directly affected by and disenfranchised with the policies of Gerald's government, and later with Wani, the closeted son of a wealthy Lebanese immigrant who benefits from the Thatcher regime's economic policies. Those two romances frame a complex tale of sterling manners and terrible decision-making.
The title derives from a quote by the English painter Hogarth, but Hollinghurst riffs on seemingly every connotation of the word ''line.'' His novel takes place in London during the swinging '80s, which means there's plenty of cocaine to go around. One of the book's many profound images appears when Nick's love of drugs and literature come crashing together as his lover cuts a few lines on a book cover.
''Wani was working painstakingly and a little defensively with his gold card, making rapid hatching movements to and fro across the partially visible features of Henry James -- not the great bald Master but the quick-eyed, tender, brilliant twenty-year-old, with an irrepressible kink in his dark hair.'' Call it The Ambassadors meets Bright Lights, Big City.
In another richly ironic passage, our hero goes on a date to see the movie Scarface and is aghast to find it ''set in a Miami so violent and so opulent, so glittering and soulless, that Nick found himself worrying about how people survived in it, and then about how he would survive in it.'' That description could just as easily apply to his own London, but Nick is so blinded by the tony lifestyle he adopted that he's unable to envision any threat at all to his own existence, despite the lingering ''AIDS question'' of the time.
Hollinghurst successfully nails all the snobbery, casual racism and quasi-fascist conservatism of Thatcher-era high society, but insisting upon the comparison with James requires some serious guts. What goes missing are two of the things that made James James: intense, unflinching psychological insights and the ability to make an unpredictable series of events fall together in such a way as to make the plot feel wholly inevitable. Hollinghurst does manage to tie together enough seemingly random details and storylines to make the style of this novel and the substance absolutely indistinguishable. In doing so he achieves enough narrative depth to swallow the reader whole. And the sheen of the prose, particularly in the immaculate description of small detail, keeps us wired the whole way through.
'The double curve was Hogarth's `line of beauty,' the snakelike flicker of an instinct, of two compulsions held in one unfolding movement. He ran his hand down Wani's back. He didn't think Hogarth had illustrated the best example of it, the dip and swell -- he had chosen harps and branches, bones rather than flesh.''
On the basis of what he accomplishes word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence, Hollinghurst must be considered among the most naturally gifted talents we have today, one just now coming into his own. Amid the countless moments to savor and to linger over, it's easy to mistake The Line of Beauty for a masterpiece, if not something approaching the perfect novel.
Andrew Ervin is a writer in Champaign, Ill.
posted by Andrew Ervin at
10/24/2004
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