Swimming Pool Library

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful and engaging novel
Review: Hollinghurst is a beautiful writer and his skill lies in having a series of gay culture stories at each novel's centrepeice while noramilising both event and content.
I have spoken to many friends both gay and straight, male and female who engaged with the story, identified with the characterisations and found the book intoxicicating and highly erotic.
As well as chronically great work surely his ability to make the marginalised and castigated, mainstream and accepted is intensely undervalued. This book is by far his best work and is filled with restless longing and dissapointment, a sexually journey of mass comparison and appeal.
These are not so much "gay" novels as incredibly important "modern" novels, this book has the hallmark of a classic.

Rating:
Summary: A near-masterpiece
Review: A masterpiece of "gay" literature and a superb book by any standard, this baroque tale of decadence in fin-de-siecle London, is a good introduction to the work of Alan Hollinghurst, THE wordsmith of the late 20th century. Do read this book before reading "The Folding Star", Hollinghurst's masterpiece. While The Swimming Pool Library is very, very good, it is "The Folding Star" that will convince you of Hollinghurst's status among the greats of English literature.

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Summary: High Degrees of Braininess and Trashiness
Review: A young English gay man from privileged class meets octogenarian privileged English gay man in a cruisy public restroom and later agrees to read older man's diaries and consider writing his biography. The reader sees similarities and differences between the lives of sexually prolific(?) homosexuals whose sexually active years occurred before and after gay sex became legal in England. Lots of titillating descriptions of men's bodies and sassy turns of phrase. The structure of the novel is inspired. Treat yourself!

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Summary: One of the most intelligent gay novels in years
Review: Alan Hollinghurst may be the most intelligent gay English-language novelist writing today, with the possible exceptions of Edmund White and Gore Vidal, but Hollinghurst is neither so precious as White nor so nutty as Vidal. THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY was his first effort, and remains his best. It marvelously captures the life enjoyed by a wealthy, handsome, leisured, and predatory London aristocrat, William Beckwith, in the early Eighties, and the way his life changes when he meets Chalres Beckwith, a titled man whom Beckwith incorrectly assumes lived a life very similar to his own. The novel is basically about the absence of gay history at the time it was written, and the ways in which privilege and security can be taken for granted. The book read very differently in 1988 (at the darkest moments of the AIDS crisis) than it does today, and its message seems less elegiac in many ways than before. It's not a novel without its problems: although Beckwith is clearly intended to be understood as morally blinkered (and he does get a something of a comeuppance eventually), his incessant vanity and self-congratulation does make him eventually a bit of a bore as first-person narrators go. Hollinghurst also witholds crucial information about the plot until the very last fifty pages of the novel, as he did in his next effort THE FOLDING STAR, so that you're not even fully aware of what the mystery guiding the novel's action really is until fairly late in the game. While this makes the final revelation more of a surprise, the book reads much better the second time than the first, when (as again with THE FOLDING STAR) there seems to be little plot to sustain your interest. Most readers have found Hollinghrust's third book, THE SPELL, the weakest of his efforts so far: it will be interesting to see if he can either repeat or surmount the success of THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY.

Rating:
Summary: Time and class can both be priviledges
Review: Alan Hollinghurst writes superb prose. He is a master wordsmith. In this novel he tells the story of Will Beckwith, a bright young gay man who lives for sex and intellectual stimulation. He is a sexual adventurer in the pre-AIDS era in London. He has one a-sexual/gay physician friend in whom he confides as well as a young hotel employee boy-toy with whom he has regular sex. He takes his sexual freedom and his priviledged class for granted. He meets Lord Nantwich, a gay gentleman in his 80's, and reluctantly agrees to help write Nantwich's memoirs based on his diaries written in Colonial Africa 60 years ago. Thus the stage is set for young Will Beckwith to begin to gain the insight that even though he and Nantwich were very similar in their youth, different age's interpretation and repression of homosexuality can lead to very different life choices and consequences.

Gay culture in 1900 and 1980 are compared in the parallel lives of Beckwith and Nantwich. This demonstrates the way gay men of younger generations may take for granted the repression and homophobia that characterized earlier periods.

The descriptions of the gay sex are as cooly rendered as the intellectual aspects of the book, Hollinghurst's speciality. Yet despite the cool veneer, Hollinghurst would have us see that it is the awareness, the awakening of class and time priviledge, that allows Will to become more fully conscious and more fully compasionate, and thus more fully alive.

I stongly recommend this book for several reasons: it is beautifully written, it explores sexual identify over time, it is erotic, it is intellectually stimulating, it confirms the ability of human's to gain insight and moral character without becoming sentimental.

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Summary: Masterfull language tells self-effacing tale of man
Review: Beckwith is a self-serving protagonist. The man is self-absorbed and has no pathos ...until the unforgiving conclusion. Beckwith is an inspired creature I must admit. We find a man who has all the things he thought he wanted. Does that remind you of someone you know? Beckwith's reminiscences and research of Lord Nantwitch reveal a trove of desire still left unclaimed and unrealized. The comparison and contrast of Beckwith and Nantwitch unmistakably defines Beckwith's situation. He has filled his life with all of the modern creature comforts and has somehow loved himself so much that he now has no one to love him back. The man is utterly alone in his crowded world with no one to understand him. Hollinghurst has made a statement about the value of such living and it is familiar and sad to many of us.

The novel is full of dark and isolated sex and conflict. There is little drama but a lot of thinking going on, until the end. I was disturbed by this novel; it evoked feelings of inadequacy and discontent that I had long shrouded with meaningless little trophies and monuments I had erected to myself.

Rating:
Summary: Crackin' read then, but showing its age now.
Review: Book reviewers have a nasty hyperbolic habit. That book they said you should fight to get a copy of all too often turns out be a turkey. Well, this one was a good read ten years ago and is a jolly romp now, but alas, Hollinghurst's later work shows this book up to be the high point of his career.

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Summary: On the Gay Fiction shelf...
Review: Englis book stores have those small alcoves that read "Gay and lesbian fiction", which I've always found very funny, say how do you classify In search of lost time: "Gay and straight fiction by gay author"?

But I'm digressing... I found Holinghurst's novel on one such shelf and I devoured it, because I liked everything in it: the language, the settings and the characters. I was especially moved by the elderly Lord N. because his story belongs to a time that is lost: Edwardian homosexuality. I am not gay but I am truly fascinated by this era of (relative) sexual freedom that was born in Cambridge and Oxford at the turn of the century, in the shadow of Oscar Wilde's downfal. Nearly all of the Bloomsbury group were gay at one time or another!

I cannot say I could relate as easily to contemporary, be it early 80s, gay mores but that hardly matters. On top of it, there are very erotic descriptions of the "love that dared not speak its name" (as Proust wd have said) which I found extremely enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: Unique, hybrid: high tone literature with sizzling erotics
Review: I recently re-read this book. It is a unique amalgam of very serious, high tone fiction and highly graphic, unadulterated scenes involving the kind of sexuality that would not make it into books that school systems adopt for even advanced high school courses. The narrator is rather selfish, aristocratic, but also appealing, in that, he makes no excuses for his human failings. At times, the depiction of gay haunts and habits is highly satirical, for example, the repeated references to "Trouble for Men," a cologne which wafts through the changing room of the swimming pool club that the narrator frequents [perhaps a dig at the extreme popularity which the Calvin Klein fragrance "Obsession" once had.] There is a two-tier structure to the work that is a little bit hard to deal with: the modern protagonist is contrasted with a man from an older era, whose life in earlier decades, when gay men were more in the shadows is meant to provide a counterpoint to the relative freedom which the younger man enjoys. This book is a rich, complex work which repays close reading and rereading.

Rating:
Summary: SWimming Pool Library
Review: I'm of two minds about this book. It is unbelievably torrid. However, the plot is transparent,and the characters totally cardboard.It is a very quick and juicy read, but don't look for much more.