Alan Hollinghurst C/D S&D

OH AND: Hollinghurst-wise, what next?

Oh, I see a few posts up that Alfred pretty much answers my question.

no he doesn't! read The Spell.

Probably gonna!

cool ;)

what did you mean by "heavy lifting"?

Taking nothing for granted, basically. Making sure he doesn't slack off at any moment.

I like to think I've written two or three decent bits of nuanced description and I've stressed out for hours making sure they work properly. Seeing Hollinghurst do it page by page makes me envious, natch.

ah i see, yes he does it so effortlessly. there's a nicholson baker essay (really just a review of the folding star) where NB boggles at hollinghurst's descriptive powers.

The Stranger's Child - about 250 pages in. I suspect I like it a bit more than the commenters above, though I'll admit the first 50 or so pages were, if not quite a chore, a bit of self-conscious effort. It's neat watching the early reverie dissolve into a great deal of faintly bitter aftertaste as the years progress. Hollinghurst writes really good parties, nailing both the awkwardness and exhiliration at once.

I wanted more parties and sex!

Ha - I've noticed how all the sex occurs in the gaps between passages. Both TLOB and this book seem to be exercises in slight disorientation, re: gaps of time, what happened and why.

Of course, the subtle time displacement could be a thing, both books being the only Hollinghurst works I've read.

omg the line of beauty is so sexy. the first shag in the private garden. whenever i go to hampstead heath in summer i feel like i am in this book.

Is The Sparsholt Affair any good? I mean, I read The Stranger's Child and I have my suspicions that TSA may be as misguided. But I've also read The Line of Beauty and The Spell and I consider both to be immaculate and The Line of beauty to be the most piercing, wise and shameless novel I've read from recent times but The Strangers Child seemed to me so wayward and misconceived that I honestly thought he'd lost the ability to plot. I want to read an excellent Hollinghurst novel but I'm not sure he's capable of writing one anymore. I'd love to be proved wrong.

The line of Beauty is truly amazing though. You ARE Nick Guest. When it gets to the denouement where Gerald confronts Nick, asking him "how did you come to be in this house?" It's like the rug has been pulled out from under of the reader rather than the character. It's incredible! So shocking!

it's like it's so fun and sexy that Hollinghurst has actually made you into this tory sex obsessed cunt while you're actually reading it. Edith Wharton does this too - Makes you root for an absolutely terrible self-serving character.

LRB was unimpressed by the plotting, 'Johnny Sparsholt is the book’s central character, but only because no one else qualifies; he seems oddly peripheral.'

When it gets to the denouement where Gerald confronts Nick, asking him "how did you come to be in this house?"

I was drawing breaths when this happened.

otm re The Stranger's Child

lege, thanks. I'd like to read that.If at any time you can paste it or put it on pastebin or similar i'd appreciate it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/magazine/the-evolution-of-one-of-fictions-gay-liberators.html

Al, Have you read the Partick Melrose novels? I've read two so far. Lovely and often v funny prose.

thanks for that link, also.

sorry i didn't see your post up there jed, here you go:
https://pastebin.com/nijMkcR1

thanks ledge!

Should try him again. The Line of Beauty was an amazing book, but after that I read The Swimming pool Library, and if ever a book was hobbled by the author being completely infatuated with their main character it was that one.

it's like it's so fun and sexy that Hollinghurst has actually made you into this tory sex obsessed cunt while you're actually reading it. Edith Wharton does this too - Makes you root for an absolutely terrible self-serving character.

― Heavy Messages (jed_), Wednesday, January 31, 2018 7:20 PM (three months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just following up on this thought, but: i'm about 100 pages into the line of beauty and it takes a remarkably sure hand to have the main character of your book be a 19-year-old coward who's obsessed with glamor and the main patriarch be a huge conservative idiot and make me feel like i'm somehow both of them. he achieves this effect partly through empathy and partly through sparing no one, and yet the book never feels mean, just correct

i'm having a *great* time reading it

the writing is so intoxicating

holy shit I AM READING THIS BOOK TOO

brad we have a book club

I'm about 80 pages in and really enjoying it. Enormous flashbacks to various privileged occasions I've been part of, albeit not in Nick's role. My schoolfriend's wedding last year is echoed so precisely in the party segment. Without being particularly experimental, Hollinghurst is a genius of observation and character - he is so sharp, he must have storyboarded each character really, really extensively - even the minor ones

So few novels have given me the assurance that I will love it forever like TLOB did in 2004

does this guy just hack everyone's mind or something, he has an uncanny brilliance for interiority

His last novel is another disappointment, though.

man TLOB gets dark at the end

i was ready for everything except isolation

"what the fuck are you doing here?"

that ending is so shocking!

the rug pulled out from your feet in the most surprising way. a total 180.

YEP

I've no doubt that that was the experience for so many conditionally-beloved young gay men in that era but the way he's systematically abandoned by everyone in those last thirty pages (over, essentially, spurious nonsense) is truly horrifying

otoh as I finished reading the book yesterday I walked up to Kensington Park Gardens (past the ogee bandstand) and found it much as I'd hoped

Gerald really is just the most boring monster in the end. Nick should have seen it coming. Maybe he did

Reminds me of Henry James' endings (The Aspern Papers, The Beast in the Jungle, The American), the axe dropping down with a sickening thud. Except with James it's usually in the final page, and largely the protagonist's own doing. Here it lasts for 30 pages and is entirely undeserved.

I'd like to think his AIDS test was negative, and these are his memoirs of the early days

Gerald really is just the most boring monster in the end.

The point of the ending imo is that you suddenly realise it's Nick that's the boring monster.

oh of course he is just as prone to criticism as any of them really

I'm 60 pages from the ending. I've finished this re-read while sitting on the beach or by the pool.

of TLoB?

Nick wasn’t a boring monster imo he was a hypocrite and a parasite, just as Gerald accused him— the AIDS test was (I felt) deliberately placed there as a maguffin, that the prospect of losing his life to AIDS was less painful that his social expulsion.

What I like about Hollinghurst is that he is able to capture both the beauty and sexiness of young white gay hedonism, but forces these same sexy protagonists to be held accountable for their actions and obliviousness

the AIDS test was (I felt) deliberately placed there as a maguffin, that the prospect of losing his life to AIDS was less painful that his social expulsion.

Rereading the last two pages, I thought this is precisely what happened. Nick imagines himself slipping from the memories of the Feddens, and it's described as an absence from lived spaces, not a spiritual one.

Yeah, exactly. It’s so interesting, when I first read the book twelve years ago, midway through I had my first and only AIDS nightmare (knocks wood)— it just seemed so clear that that was where the book was heading. To have the tragedy be something completely different, and come so abruptly, was so extremely intense

I just read the final sixty pages again now and feel so palpably Nick’s pretence of trying to stay cool and apologetic in the face of a family who wants him gone, and implicitly, don’t care if he lives or dies

And also that expression of unconditional love, ugh, it’s such a great book, dammit, I need to read his other novels

Yeah, exactly. It’s so interesting, when I first read the book twelve years ago, midway through I had my first and only AIDS nightmare (knocks wood)— it just seemed so clear that that was where the book was heading. To have the tragedy be something completely different, and come so abruptly, was so extremely intense

I just read the final sixty pages again now and feel so palpably Nick’s pretence of trying to stay cool and apologetic in the face of a family who wants him gone, and implicitly, don’t care if he lives or dies

And also that expression of unconditional love, ugh, it’s such a great book, dammit, I need to read his other novels

Anyone read the new one yet? As a fan of his best work I've swithering about it but it's long, I was underwhelmed by The Stranger's Child and reviews have been patchy (inc one or two likening it to TSC, not a good thing).

Not impressed -- an etiolated thing.

Shame. Before TSC was published he was just about my favourite current novelist. Massive anticipation for the next one. Would hardly have believed I could get from there to probably not bothering to read his next but one.

I'm in the same position.

Just finished *The Line of Beauty*. Hollinghurst has said he couldn't/wouldn't write an explicitly political novel but I was still surprised by the lack of outright rage about Aids. Not that I wanted it to be didactic but you could come away from the text with no real sense of just how fucking toxic and vile the situation was in the UK in the 80s.

I keep thinking about the ending. The expulsion was brutal but it made sense. You can see how the situation with Guest arose and how his staying was situational and largely unexamined: it was only in light of the 'scandal' that the family needed to retroactively make sense of it, and needed to save face; how his presence - even as a kind of unpaid carer for Catherine - by necessity for them, became parasitic, almost vampiric.

Can't decide what to make of the literal last few lines. Does he finally see through the 'lines of beauty' to the mundane, but equally beautiful, reality beneath?

I love the last couple of pages, not least because of their implication of the future in which we will one day look back at that time. I think his perception of the 'beautiful' in the last line is sincere; unsure if that implies 'seeing through' other things.

Nick wasn’t a boring monster imo he was a hypocrite and a parasite, just as Gerald accused him— the AIDS test was (I felt) deliberately placed there as a maguffin, that the prospect of losing his life to AIDS was less painful that his social expulsion.

goon otm

Imagine being called a hypocrite and a parasite by that oleaginous cretin and him being *right*.

And that closing passage: it's probably more a kind of hyper-sensitivity brought on by the trauma of his betrayal but something about that 'there was a street corner at all' - like the aesthete was finally, however briefly, forced to see to the heart of things, literally and metaphorically.

Gerald, ftr, not fgti.