Rating: 
Summary: A Precious Portrait
Review: It's really a chore to easily categorize this book and the only thing for sure is that its protagonist is a character one would not likely forget easily. There's all the stuff of a easy read- relatively simple language, established plot devices, etc- but the tone itself is high literary and the ending is very unconventional. Most striking about this novel is that you cannot really comprehend how skilled an observer of manners and people the novelist is until you encounter someone in real-life that very much resembles Beckwith. You quickly realize that Hollinghurst has not gone the easy route and created an exxagerated character but has rather beautifully and faithfully rendered into fiction a most remarkable but also distressing social type.
Rating:
Summary: "Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved,..." A charm.
Review: THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY is a literary fiction with a shimmering elegance about a young aristocrat who lives off his inherited estate and leads a life of promiscuity. A chance meeting with Lord Nantwich, an old Africa hand and founder of the prestigious London Wick's Club, lands William Beckwith into a research project that evolves to become the old man's biography. Wovens with his assiduous riffling of Lord Nantwich's materials are nuanced episodes of sexual rapport William engages with men at whom he flirtatiously smiles at the gym. The prose is ebulliently literary and suggestive, but not prurient. Page after page of the novel is riddled with the elaboration of bare intimacy, the explosive liberation of libido, the palpitating anatomy that preludes to carnal pleasure, and the audacious verbalization of physical gestures. Something masculine momentarily bridles as our protagonist ventures into casual number with strangers.
The writing of Lord Nantwich's biography is as much a matter of probing his memory for links and identifications and of reading his personalia as examining his own life for William. The old man's eventful and seemingly eccentric life so often evokes and echoes William's own feelings, and at times brings him to the edge of difficult emotional terrain. The arrival of his anti-gay grandfather, who has spent all his life in circles where good manners, conservative family values, and plain callousness conspire to avoid any recognition or vestige that homosexuality even exists, intensifies the poignancy of such feelings.
Leading his life the way he does, it is strangers who by their very strangeness quickens William's pulse and makes him feel alive. Regardless of the irrational sense of absolute security that springs from the conspiracy of carnal pleasure with men, shares something more genuine and cultivated with his close friend James with whom the friendship is sealed with a playfulness, privacy, tenderness, secrecy and a tacit understanding. William and James somehow enact some charade, whose very subject is secrecy, one that even permits his reading of James' diary from which he is obliged to see himself from his friend's perspective. The friendship, though has remained sexless for a long time, nourishes a nervous pleasure at the certainty of companionship when needed. The friendship preponderates the kind of seize-the-moment relationship William shares with Phil, who might have lived a double life as William begins to suspect at the faintly sickening possibility of his being unfaithful.
THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY exposes the day-to-day episodes of gay life. Nipping into a library of uncatalogued pleasure is a realm of halt, darkness, and unknown possibility. It is in this uncharted territory where the difference between sex and companionship becomes blurry. William's affair with the underage bellboy Phil is one of ephemeral pleasure, glutting eroticism, and raw voluptuousness. Lies beneath all the vivid illustration of desires is the concern of an emptiness that has, for example, manifested in James: when one is beyond love, where does pleasure lie? Is there ever an end to the irresistible, normal craving for sex? Or does this go tauntingly on? The root of his loneliness and eccentricities, his uninvestigated and inhibited private life, is not uncommon to everyone: the humiliation of stark rejection and the terrible feeling that no one ever notices him or remembers him.
THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY, a 1984 debut, is an enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS. It welds the standard elements of fiction to a tale of transgressions with the emphasis being on sensitive and censurable materials. It tells of impurities with shimmering elegance, of complications with a quick wit, and of truths with a fiction's solidity. It embodies a gloomy, sober, and functional underworld-full of life, purpose, and sexuality.
Rating:
Summary: Gay Life as it is...or was?
Review: This book is superb. One of the first gay books that did'nt complain, search excuses, but simply shows what being gay is like. Gay sexuality is intensely portrayed and at times humorously mocked (oh,yes, nothing of your politically correct restraint). The flaw of the book is that the plot is very thin and virtually nonexistent. But the style is fabulous
Rating:
Summary: Masterful Writing
Review: This is the first "gay genre" book I've read. I bought it because the author just won the 2004 Booker Prize. Alan Hollinghurst writes beautifully. His prose has a certain limpid clarity accomplished the very best English authors. Its form is that of a narrative memoir, and contains within it, in part, diary entries by one of the main characters. In all, The Swimming Pool Library has more of the overall "feel" of a diary than a work of fiction. Hollinghurst's attention to detail is superb; his descriptions of the physical aspects of people, landscapes, and architecture are superb, and his evocation on London night life has a real feeling of authenticity. Strange to say, for a gay man Hollinghurst seems to take a surprisingly dispassionate approach to romance in this book. The author is quite spare in entering into the psychology of his characters in toto, which, in a sense, is appropriate, since the human heart -both our own and others'- remains, for the most part, a delicious and maddening mystery. The only reason why I did not give this five stars is that the last ten percent of the book seems to become a bit befuddled in its plotting, and what resolutions there are appear to be a bit rushed, and not altogether as tightly planned as the previous 90%. In the end, The Swimming Pool Library just seems to peter out, and whatever insight into his characters Hollinghurst had earlier in the book seems to get a little lost. Also, for me, the total lack of female characters made The Swimming Pool Library feel more than a bit claustrophobia-inducing. However, the very best fiction leaves one with a deeper appreciation of the changes and chances of one's own life, and the lives of other people. Hollinghurst beautifully achieves this for the greater part of this book, but loses it at the very end. Unless, of course, there is a "to be continued..." that I missed.
Rating: 
Summary: The Sauna Archives
Review: This novel is probably different from anything else you will ever read. A tale of mentorship, treachery, lust, it presents two characters of remarkable similarity, their situations largely the result of the history and the generations between them. Young William Beckwith, a carefree man and aristocratic scion, gleefully moves from encounter to encounter, all the while attempting to enjoy a couple of long-term relationships. After a couple of meetings with elderly Lord Nantwich, Beckwith is recruited to review his diaries. While both agree that a biography is the ultimate potential outcome of the examination, Beckwith is less than eager to launch himself into the world of responsibility and commitments. He reads the books in scattershot manner, never letting his interest in the older man get in the way of his funtime. The diaries themselves offer brief glimpses of life as an aristocratic gay man in early 20th-century Colonial Africa. Inevitably, that lifestyle would disappear with the second world war, just like Beckwith's wanton existence would (post-novel) be irrevocably altered by an impending health crisis. All this lends a rather somber mood to the whole affair. Wafting throughout the novel is the fragrance of "Trouble for Men." After the initial set-up, the novel seems stuck in place for the first two-thirds, leaving increasingly tiresome sex scenes to interest the reader. That is probably the book's greatest flaw, but the presence of "Trouble" is increasingly felt and Beckwith's family history is brought up in a manner that will change his attitudes. Predictably, the sex becomes more interesting at that point. The novel proceeds to end in daring fashion.
Rating:
Summary: Disturbingly Erotic
Review: This novel is well-written, and vacillates between extremely well-written fiction and minutely detailed erotica. The story centers around Will, a promiscuous, narcisscistic, wealthy gay young Londoner in the pre-AIDS era of the early 1980's. Will has no financial or moral restrictions. He leads us on a journey through the hot summer of 1983, that is at times graphic, and also historically engrossing. Will Beckwith's adventures are by far some of the most graphically-detailed I have ever read, but highly erotic for both gay and straight readers. Concurrently, Will encounters an elderly British Lord who wants Will to write his life story. There is an undercurrent of duplicity in all of his relationships, from his passionate, physical affair with the young, uneducated hotel employee, Phil, to the exact nature of his professional dealings with his Lordship. Also, there is a pitying tone to his relationship with his best friend, a doctor who is also gay, but who is the only person who seems to have Will's heart, instead of his libido. This is not your ordinary novel. Alan Hollinghurst is an extremely intelligent writer, who can also write with an almost animalistic sense of depravity. It is almost like reading two novels; on one page, extremely explicit sex, on another, intellectual stimulation. It is certainly one of the most unique books of its kind I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: Old and young
Review: Will Beckwith is a young Brit of privilege who leads a life of leisure and sexual escapades, whether he has a boyfriend or not. He befriends the elderly Lord Nantwich who pressures him to co-write his memoirs, but the young man has many hesitations, and as he reads Nantwich's journals, he finds himself equally fascinated and alarmed at the connections he sees with his own life. In his youth, Nantwich was much like Will and he met a bevy of notable queers, including E. M. Forster and Ronald Firbank. "The Swimming-pool Library" is #34 of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels for its exploration of gay camaraderie, history, sexuality, and literature, as well as for its interactions between the younger gay culture and the older gay culture mostly cast aside and ignored. The novel ends as a kind of elegy that shimmers with surprises.
Rating: 
Summary: Homosexuality for all sexual preferences:
Review: Women! Want to get those juices of desire flowing whiledipping into literature more inspiring than romance novels? Try thistitillating book for all sexual preferences! I speak for women who have read this wonderfully sensual book about homosexuality in early nineteenth and also more recent England, with a little African history thrown in: a book about a man writing a biography of a mysterious older man he meets in the London public baths. On a par in literary quality with A.S. Byatt's "Possession," and in some ways more perfectly constructed.
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