The Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
Bloomsbury. 448 pages, $24.95
ALAN HOLLINGHURST’S new novel, The Line of Beauty, begins in 1983, just when The Swimming Pool Library left off—though its leading man is not the confident cocksman of the first book. This time it’s a shy young æsthete who’s writing a dissertation on Henry James and who takes a room in the London mansion of the family of a classmate with whom he’s in love. Nick Guest is smarter than the Feddens—about literature, painting, music, architecture—but otherwise at a disadvantage: he’s poor, averse to confrontation, and gay. He’s also charged with the task that no one else in the family wants: looking after his classmate’s manic-depressive sister Catherine. Indeed, he’s so obviously the odd man out that one reads this book almost on edge, watching him navigate his way through one shark-infested set piece after another (posh birthday party, posh stately home, posh villa in the south of France), all the while playing diplomat in the undeclared war between Catherine and her father, a politician on his way up in the Thatcher government.
No one writes novels better than Hollinghurst; he puts together books that are like pieces of furniture made without nails. Here he dramatizes with innumerable apt details and intricate plotting a whole household meant to stand for the Thatcher era. The Thatcherites here are mostly vulgarians whose mansions, Bentleys, and new money are based on things like asset-stripping and imported bananas. They are also Jewish, Lebanese, and in some cases gay. Everyone is on the make. Nick is trying to get two fatuous American queens to finance his proposed film of a Henry James novel, and what he tells them about The Spoils of Poynton fits The Line of Beauty perfectly: “I think it’s probably a very bleak book, even though it’s essentially a comedy.”
In fact, Hollinghurst’s fourth novel presents as bilious a picture of London as The Swimming Pool Library did, even if this time the gay world has been expanded to include politics. (Homosexuality, Hollinghurst has said in an interview, is “less interesting” now, in a “happy” way—i.e., there’s no longer any need to describe it.) The Line of Beauty is yet another description of the ways in which a gay man does not belong. Here’s Nick at his classmate’s birthday: “He felt restless and forgotten, peripheral to an event which, he remembered, had once been thought of as his party too. His loneliness bewildered him for a minute, in the bleak perspective of the bachelors’ corridor: a sense close to panic that he didn’t belong in this house with these people.” He doesn’t—and Hollinghurst’s subtle reinforcement of this fact is so relentless that three-quarters of the way through this extremely witty book one may feel oneself strangely weary, as if the cocaine that eats away at its characters is eating away at you, too.
Things move along in this tour de force at a rapid pace, however: a large cast of sharply drawn characters comes in and out; one dazzling set piece succeeds another; the dialogue is so good you want to hear actors deliver it on film. The 80’s may be a tale already told—it’s no fun watching noses bleed from coke again—but what saves the story is the originality of Hollinghurst’s inclusion of Nick Guest (a character one could argue about for hours) in the general greed. “There is a sort of æsthetic poverty about conservatism,” Nick says to the poor black boyfriend he’s showing around the Feddens’ house while they’re away—but this does not include the family he’s living with: they have a Guardi in the drawing room. Nick is a connoisseur. This devotee of Henry James can deduce the provenance of any object that comes before him; when he recognizes the small painting Lord Kessler gives Mrs. Fedden on her anniversary as a Gauguin, he keeps his mouth shut rather than risk showing off. But even he concludes “the essentials of heaven” are opera and cocaine. In other words, his æstheticism leads to hell as surely as the Tories’ worship of the Iron Lady did.
Indeed, you could argue that this novel isn’t really about politics. It’s about social-climbing—the sheer chaos of appetite and manners that politics like Thatcher’s can unleash. Thatcher took over the Tory Party the way Reagan supplanted the Rockefeller Republicans: a revolt from below. “There’s a sort of reverse social gravity these days, isn’t there?” Nick says when he hears that a millionaire Lebanese grocer whose son he’s having an affair with is to be knighted. “People just plummet upstairs.” But, strictly speaking, this would have to include our slippery, go-between protagonist, who’s literally living upstairs at the Feddens’ while ingratiating himself with the family every moment he can.
Eventually, however, our hero comes to ruin among the fleshpots of London, and when he does, The Line of Beauty may suddenly seem, despite its contemporary setting, as old-fashioned as Richardson’s Pamela—or Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. Though the Tories betray themselves as racist, homophobic, etc., Nick’s æsthetic appetites don’t turn out so well either. They devolve, in fact, into the pornography, hustlers, drugs, and tricking of gay life itself, until a new disease turns Nick’s “secret victory” (sex with men) into what Mrs. Fedden says it was at the beginning: “vulgar and unsafe.” Yet it is here that Hollinghurst finally steps outside the l8th-century cleverness of his miniature theatre. This is a book that is saved by its ending. After the paradoxical tedium of the smart banter and London high life, what rings truest, and what Hollinghurst presents with marvelous restraint, is the thing that made the 80’s truly horrible: AIDS.
Hollinghurst recalls Jane Austen—recombining with each book the same elements in different ways. At least the new novel profits from its predecessors. The writing has never been sharper, whether it’s describing a PWA in a fashionable restaurant or a refugee pianist with too much technique. (“She played the beginning of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 like a courier starting a motorbike.”) The problem is to what end all this skill is being put. In Hollinghurst’s work what we admire is the observing eye, and the language that records it so very accurately. What we miss so often is characters to care about. The author’s refusal to tip his hand, leaving the reader to make his own judgments, becomes in the end a reserve that defeats itself. The Line of Beauty has more memorable characters than all of Hollinghurst’s other books combined; yet it observes these figures with the same eye it turns on the furniture.
In the end—save, perhaps, for the family cook—everyone in The Line of Beauty comes a cropper. And that seems to be the point. The nickname given an American journalist, “the Mordant Analyst,” describes too well the tone of the narrator of this sparkling tragedy, whose astringent pathos is closer to Evelyn Waugh than to Henry James. The novel’s not only an exposé of what the narrator calls “the æsthetics of snobbery” but an example of it. Like The Spoils of Poynton, this is a bleak comedy. Both novels climax with a spectacular verbal assault—Mrs. Gereth on Fleda Vetch (in Spoils), Barry Grooms on Nick (in Beauty) in a stupendous aria of homophobia. Both books end with a house tumbling down, one literally, the other metaphorically. But we care about Fleda Vetch in a way we never do about Nick—which is not to say The Line of Beauty isn’t perfect on its own terms. It’s just that the terms seem a little cold.
