Line of Beauty

Rating:
Summary: Incredibly overrated
Review: Fawning over wealth, power, their symbols and the beautiful people does not make a satire. If I wanted to know about the contents of a wealthy family's house I would prefer to look at Architectural Digest or some other glossy of the rich.
[...] The difference is significant. His characters are men who have sex with men and they seem amazed by the behavior of straight folks. But they wholeheartedly support the status quo. They know how to be excruciatingly polite and cultured but they never let real feeling get in the way of grand pretensions.
Hollinghust's "satire" of the ruling class recalls a story of a minister who abhorred pornography so much that he had to see every variety so he could protest them all. Right.

Rating:
Summary: Major Disappointment
Review: I enjoyed and was deeply impressed by his other books, especially the first two. He's not afraid of depth of character or complexity or humor. So what went wrong here? It's well written, line my line, but I didn't care a hoot about any of the characters. Good writers know that even if you're creating a shallow character and and even a shallow era he or she should be interesting, have edges, etc. The set-piece: the party near the end is great. The last section felt manipulative. Well, he's still a good writer and I'll surely give his next book a read. As to he Booker's. I haven't read Cloud Atlas, but thought Toibin's "The Master" transcendent. But then, I don't get to vote

Rating:
Summary: Hollinghurst's fine "Line."
Review: "What would Henry James have made of us," one of his characters wonders midway through Alan Hollinghurst's exquisitely written novel, THE LINE OF BEAUTY (p. 123). This nearly perfect novel in fact reads a lot like a Henry James classic, but with much randieness. The protagonist, Nick Guest, is even a James scholar. He is also a homosexual, and THE LINE OF BEAUTY tells the story of London's gay culture in three sections, dated 1983, 1986 and 1987.

After graduating from Oxford, Nick takes up residence in the Notting Hill mansion of the Fedden family, whose son, Toby, was Nick's best friend at Oxford. Toby's father, Gerald Fedden, is a conservative, Thatcher Tory, which enables Nick to attend lavish parties, while secretly pursuing two love affairs, the first with Leo, a black London clerk, and the other with Wani Ouradi, a Lebanese millionaire and Oxford acquaintance. Over the course of the novel, Nick's life becomes a series of parties, drugs, sex and three-ways, snobbery, and scandal all under the deadly cloud of AIDS.

Hollinghurst's novel unfolds like a Jamesian drama or a Merchant-Ivory film, punctuated with numerous instances of rather graphic sex. Hollinghurst portrays London's 1980's gay culture as sensitive, lonely, and doomed by the "bloody plague" of AIDS (p. 293). Like James, Hollinghurst writes about family, high society, politics, and sexuality with satire, subtle wit, and aesthetic discourses. It is not surprising that THE LINE OF BEAUTY won the Man Booker Prize.

I started reading this novel at London Heathrow Airport while waiting for a plane, and then couldn't put it down even once during my ten-hour flight back to the States. Enough said.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant but passionless
Review: Anyone who read The Swimming Pool Library knows that Alan Hollinghurst can spin a tale. That book with its rich evocation of gay privileged Londoners in a time before Aids was a stunning original. And The Line of Beauty mines some of the same territory. The protagonists are the leisured, cultured classes profiting from Thatcher's liberated economy.
He's a brilliant writer. But in this book at least a cold and distant one too. These are not people you can like. Or even want to spend much time with.
I wish I could have liked this book more. Holinghurst is certainly a talented author who knows how to keep the story licking along. But his creations lack warmth or likeability. This is probably his intention so you could call it a success. You're not meant to like them. They are set up to be masters of their own misfortune. But its also a relief to leave them behind at the end.


Rating:
Summary: Complete & Total Perfection!
Review: Glancing through some of the harsh reviews for this book I am struck by the realization that some very sad people must be severly allergic to sterling prose. Or to honest and vivid gay sex. Or both!

I found the structure of this novel---beginning in 1983 and then jumping ahead to 1987---evoked for me Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, To The Lighthouse. A main character dies in the gap between years in this book just as the beloved mother does in the Woolf novel. (A novel I am perhaps foolishly assuming ever lover of great prose has read at least once.)

Beyond the perfect structure of this book I found the writing to be absolutely cherishable. I have not re-read sentences this often since reading The Hours by Michael Cunningham. And the characters in this book are very true to the 80's that I remember very vividly.

This astonishing author has brought back the sharp pain that never really leaves---most of my beloved friends of those 80's are long gone. I miss them fresh after this book.

If this book doesn't work a magic spell on you then you need to return to school and learn how to read with discernment and passion. Bravo, Master Hollinghurst!

Rating:
Summary: A hypocrite in his pleasures
Review: Having read last year's Man Booker prize winner, the disappointing "Vernon God Little," I approached Alan Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty" with no small amount of trepidation. While lacking the scope of Hollinghurst's earlier novel, "The Swimming Pool Library," and less ingratiating than "The Spell," this is a very fine novel that has something important to say about Thatcher-era England (there, I managed to say it without using the word "go-go"). As in "The Spell," however, it's often hard to reconcile the satire with Hollinghurst's obvious fascination with the very people he sets up to ridicule. Plus, as the novel's narrative center, Nick Guest (his last name says it all), is a bit too calculating to provide a touchstone character for the average reader (he is a 21-year-old virgin who answers a personal ad to have his first sex), and you may not care whether his fortunes rise or fall at story's end (they mostly rise--after all, Nick is only 25 at the conclusion of the novel and he manages to profit handsomely from his association with a wealthy lover). He is the man who came to dinner, with a vengeance. Having been invited home to spend the weekend by his college buddy, Toby Fedden (the attraction is hard to understand outside of the context of wealth and power), he stays on for four years, ostensibly to nursemaid the most fragile personality in the household, Toby's sister Catherine, who turns out to be the equal, in terms of calculation, not only of Nick, but of her own father, Gerald, a Tory MP whose ambitions run to having "the Lady" herself (Thatcher) as a houseguest. We're left with a suggestion that Nick might have AIDS, but there is little in the novel to support this--he is apparently a "top" who always uses protection and is regularly tested--although he is certainly unlucky in his lovers, both of whom get the disease. The pleasure in reading this novel, obviously influenced by James and Waugh, but also by Forster and Fitzgerald, is in the writing. Hollinghurst is a prose master who will have you reaching for the dictionary, as well as your French phrase book, to look up words like "enfilade" and "reredos" and phrases like "trou de gloire." He is also an expert on music, art, and antiquities. He is an aesthete with a soupcon of self-loathing that is often betrayed in his prose. He reserves some of his harshest satire for two rich American "Queens," whose names, Treat Rush and Brad Craft, "sounded rather like porn actors." It is these gentlemen who want to turn Nick's script for a Merchant-Ivory type production of James' "The Spoils of Poynton" into a vulgar sex romp (they particularly object to the name of James' heroine, Fleda Vetch). Nick may be a homosexual, but he is also a mensch; he doesn't take it up the chimney, nor does he resort to embarrassing camp. His sex (and drug) life apart, he is a bit of a voyeur, an "extra player" who is neither "visible" nor "relevant"--an "accidental eavesdropper." Which probably explains why he has no friends in the Fedden household, when the excrement hits the fan. For students of literature who despair of nuance in the novel, "The Line of Beauty"--its very title, from a treatise on aesthetics by Hogarth, suggests a well-shaped arse as well as a line of cocaine--is for you. If Hollinghurst would only learn a little Jamesian detachment, he might indeed represent the best hope for the modern British novel.

Rating:
Summary: rather disappointing
Review: Read the book on a transatlantic flight and afterwards, but found it rather tedious. As a portrait of a chattering society, Proust did unmeasurably better and we don't need any more of that. As to the main character, Ripley (Highsmith) comes to my mind and he was a much more interesting character than Nick. And as a piece of political satire, it is also not very exciting or revealing. Whether it is a profound portrayal of gay life, I cannot judge. The book just did not engage me on any of these levels, and as a Booker winner it is quite disappointing.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Perfection
Review: The Line of Beauty is a very gripping literary novel that touches on some subjects many authors would be too terrified to approach. Set in the high-class 80s London world, the novel offers characters you will love to hate. These are very complicated people, filling an even more complicated narrative.

Nick Guest has just moved in with the Tippers, the parents of Toby, one of his best college friends. The head of the household, Gerald, holds a job in the Parliament, while his wife, Rachel, seems to be just another unhappy blue-blood wife. Their daughter, Cat, is highly excitable and very tourmented. She doesn't want to be part of the life she's leading, while also loving the chances and opportunities she's been given.

Nick is the narrator of the Tipper's life, as well as his own. Never impartial, Nick is the ever-present boy who loves to watch the defeat of others. The fact that nick is always on the prowl, finding romance in different places (like Leonard, his first love, or Wani, the son of a very, very successful and rich businessman) only adds and edge to his character. As the 80s pass him by, he will be faced with one drama after another, whether it be about his own personal life or about the AIDS epidemic that is slowly ravaging London's gay community.

Nick is the character you will love to hate and hate to love. You never truly understand him, yet his story always makes you hungry for more. It's very hard to put this one down.

Hollinghurst has written a novel that is at times bitingly funny, at times incredibly sad. This dichotomy helps make A Line of Beauty the very exciting read that it is. Never too complicated for the reader's own good, but never too simple to make you want to put this one down. A Line of Beauty is a very rare literary novel that you can truly enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: Prose like polished diamonds
Review: THE LINE OF BEAUTY, the latest offering from Alan Hollinghurst, is a brilliant, witty, and satirical look at the excesses of upper crust gay life in London during the Thatcher years. Hollinghurst's description of Thatcher's visit to Fedden's house is hilarious. But the real star in this book is Hollinghurst's prose: pure brilliance. I haven't read his other books (yet), but can't wait to devour them.

Rating:
Summary: AN INTERESTING READ
Review: the reason that i label this book an interesting read is the fact that as a person of 24 yrs old i cannot directly relate to the time period this book takes place in. also not to mention the fact that i am not english and i have no idea the type atmosphere the thatcher era england blanketed over england. but there was something about this book that kept me reading. although i was very young when this book is going on it is interesting to see the type of goings on in this time period. you have the main character of nick, a young twenty-something fresh out of oxford and living with a class mate and his family. he is a virgin and a person who still holds onto his innocence. he has an ongoing crush on his friend toby and is really good friends with toby's sister catherine. the parents gerald and rachel fedden in a way accept him as one of their own children and expose him to a totally different world than he is accustomed to because he does not come from the same upper class as the feddens. nick comes into contact with his first real love through a relationship add, his name is leo and the two of them really hit it off. through leo's character the subject of aids comes into play through an ex of leo who is introduced to nick. although the word aids is never said at this point anyone in this day and age can put together the affliction affecting the character of pete. then the book jumps ahead a couple of years and nick has started to settle nicely into his homosexuality and has a boyfriend who was also a class mate at oxford, wani. with the character of wani you see the world of the rich and powerful and the "luxuries" that come along with wealth. by luxury i am referring to the rampant use of cocaine in the 80s. it seems that in every chapter nick and wani are off together doing a "line of beauty" at some party or an intimate moment. there is a lot more that goes on in the novel at the end but i would not want to ruin anymore of the story. but this book does go into a lot of detail and at times i felt that the detail was a little too much. there is a lot of description of the setting and the buildings and the inside of the buildings almost to the point of personification. the whole setting was a character in itself. and for some parts of the novel it seemed appropriate and then in others it seemed like extra words. every once in a while hollinghurst will sneak in a sex scene and personally i found every one of them quite erotic and well written. i like the fact that all the scenes were not hardcore sex but more about the subtleness of the situation, they were not over powering but they were effective nonetheless. he is also quite the tease especially in one scene between nick and toby. read it for yourself because personally i found myself glued to the page and my mind reeling with all sorts of scenarios. this type of tease is what also makes this nove intersting and drives the reader to continue reading. i really liked this book and found myself just intrigued by how much the world has changed in the last twenty years but also seeing that there are some things that are still the same. like i said this book is intersting and will keep the reader wanting a little more with each chapter.