FOLDING STAR, THE : A Novel

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Summary: Hollinghurst's Postmodern Feat
Review: The modernist/postmodernist break in literary studies is hotly contested. A fairly clear example of the dichotomy can be seen when Joyce's ULYSSES is contrasted with FINNEGAN'S WAKE. If discontinuity and disjunction are seen as the hallmarks of the postmodern novel (Acker, DeLillo, Auster), Alan Hollinghurst's second novel THE FOLDING STAR qualifies only in part under that rubric. If his first novel THE SWIMMING POOL LIBRARY illustrates a decidedly modernist cast of mind, this second work, with its undecidable ending, operates at least within the shadow of a postmodernist aesthetic. Whereas the protagonist of the first book embodies the modern well-to-do aesthete, THE FOLDING STAR offers a spiritually impoverished main character whose obsession with a young Belgian boy, his student, suggests that of Humbert Humbert for Lolita and manages to capture the elegiac tone of Nabokov's masterwork. And while both Hollinghurst novels decode mysteries as the action that gives impetus to the narrative, in THE FOLDING STAR, this devise remains only that. The search for Luc Altidore, while culminating in actual physical peregrinations on the part of the protagonist, is ultimately an interior search for the meaning of love in the age of AIDS and in the tenuousness of human relationships. Hollinghurst's feat with this work is the accomplishment of a postmodern ironic aesthetic in conjunction with an old-fashion romance not unlike Susan Sontag's THE VOLCANO LOVER (though the tones of the two works are similarly elegiac, most other aspects could not be more different). Read THE SWIMMING POOL LIBRARY first in order to get to know Hollinghurst's at times rather baroque style. Afterwards the experience of reading THE FOLDING STAR will be greatly enhanced. The narrative enfolds the reader in a myth as old as that of the shepherds catching sight of the Star of Bethlehem; and as in that ancient tale, the moment of discovery signals a birth and a rebirth.