Often seeking his reflection in the gilt-framed mirrors of his fashionable friends, Nick is unsure of his footing in this opulent "looking-glass world" and is secretly ashamed of his own dull provincial parents - his fretting mother and his antique-dealer father, who winds the clocks in the grand houses of the local aristocracy. As the boom years of the 80's unfurl, Nick becomes ever more deeply entwined with the romance of the Feddens and their luminous world of money and privilege, while through a black civil servant, Leo, he avidly discovers the pleasures of metropolitan gay life. Nicholas Guest, intellectual, gay and about to turn 21, has been invited to lodge in the seigneurial West London mansion of Gerald Fedden, M.P., a coming man in the Thatcher government and the father of his Oxford friend Toby.
Historically, "The Line of Beauty" picks up where "The Swimming-Pool Library" concluded, in the summer of 1983, the last summer before AIDS began its grim reaping. To say, then, that his latest novel, the Booker Prize-winning "Line of Beauty," is also his finest should give some idea of its accomplishment, not just in the breadth of its ambition but in its felicities of observation and expression. Thereafter "The Spell" (1999) conjured a lighter tone, though still sprung with the enchantments of Hollinghurst's sly, feline wit. There haven't been many English debuts more exquisitely executed or scorchingly candid than "The Swimming-Pool Library" (1988), nor follow-ups that could outdazzle it as brilliantly as did "The Folding Star" (1994). $24.95.ĪS a novelist, Alan Hollinghurst has set himself an intimidating standard.
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