Alan Hollinghurst wrote the award winnig Line of Beauty and now his new book The Stranger's Child is heading for Man Booker Prize 2011.
A brief about what Line of Beauty was all about !
In the summer of 1983, 20-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Tory MP Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby whom Nick had idolized at Oxford and Catherine, always standing at a critical angle to the family and its assumptions and ambitions. As the Thatcher boom-years unfold, Nick, an innocent in the worlds of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of the glamorous family he is entangled with. Two vividly contrasting love-affairs, with a young black clerk and a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to him as that of power and riches to his friends. Starting at the moment The Swimming-Pool Library ended, The Line of Beauty traces the further history of a decade of change and tragedy. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, it is a major work by one of the finest writers in the English language. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Among its other wonders, this almost perfectly written novel, recently longlisted for the Man Booker, delineates what's arguably the most coruscating portrait of a plutocracy since Goya painted the Spanish Bourbons. To shade in the nuances of class, Hollingsworth uses plot the way it was meant to be used—not as a line of utility, but as a thematically connected sequence of events that creates its own mini-value system and symbols.The book is divided into three sections, dated 1983, 1986 and 1987. The protagonist, Nick Guest, is a James scholar in the making and a tripper in the fast gay culture of the time. The first section shows Nick moving into the Notting Hill mansion of Gerald Fedden, one of Thatcher's Tory MPs, at the request of the minister's son, Toby, Nick's all-too-straight Oxford crush. Nick becomes Toby's sister Catherine's confidante, securing his place in the house, and loses his virginity spectacularly to Leo, a black council worker. The next section jumps the reader ahead to a more sophisticated Nick. Leo has dropped out of the picture; cocaine, three-ways and another Oxford alum, the sinisterly alluring, wealthy Lebanese Wani Ouradi, have taken his place. Nick is dimly aware of running too many risks with Wani, and becomes accidentally aware that Gerald is running a few, too. Disaster comes in 1987, with a media scandal that engulfs Gerald and then entangles Nick. While Hollinghurst's story has the true feel of Jamesian drama, it is the authorial intelligence illuminating otherwise trivial pieces of story business so as to make them seem alive and mysteriously significant that gives the most pleasure. This is Nick coming home for the first and only time with the closeted Leo: "there were two front doors set side by side in the shallow recess of the porch. Leo applied himself to the right hand one, and it was one of those locks that require tender probings and tuggings, infinitesimal withdrawals, to get the key to turn." This novel has the air of a classic.
"She is either Muse or she is nothing," Robert Graves wrote. After the Renaissance, the Greek goddesses of artistic inspiration were replaced by real—if idealized—women (think Dante and Beatrice). In these well-researched essays, Prose examines the lives of nine women who inspired some of history's most prominent artists and writers, including Samuel Johnson, Man Ray, and John Lennon. Nearly all these muse-artist relationships were distinguished by tragedy, and only five were sexually consummated; as Prose notes, "The power of longing is more durable than the thrill of possession." What emerges by the end of the book, oddly, is a case for the singularity of artistic influence: the author shows that Lewis Carroll's attachment to Alice Liddell was not at all like Nietzsche's sense of intellectual kinship with Lou Andreas-Salomé, nor was Yoko Ono's involvement with John Lennon as fruitful as Suzanne Farrell's with George Balanchine. The strongest essays here, on Liddell, Farrell, Ono, and Lee Miller (a Vogue model and photographer who posed for and worked with Man Ray), pointedly refute the notion that the role of the muse is a passive one, and offer in its place a complicated vision of the necessary contradictions of artistic life—including the desire for both feverish devotion and artistic independence, and a sense of the truth of beauty and the transience of it. Prose's broader conclusions about culture can seem hasty, but the book's achievement is its quiet reëvaluation of the received notion that genius is solitary in nature.
The Line of Beauty is the first novel focused on gay life to win the Booker Prize, yet it does more than glance back at the sometimes frivolous and deadly aspects of London’s gay culture. Hollinghurst, acknowledged as one of his generation’s best writers, is an incisive social and political satirist. With a sly wit, he confirms stereotypes about class, family, society, politics, and sexuality in ‘80s-era London—just like Henry James did for late nineteenth-century New York and European society. Hollinghurst handles serious themes with a light touch—and a soft dose of morality.
What emerges is a remarkable psychological portrait of an era. There’s the obsequious Nick, who can’t deal with power around him, his benumbed lovers, smarmy politicians, and coke dealers. In his previous novels Hollinghurst all but ignored women; here, they come into their own. Rachel possesses a "velvety graciousness lined with steel," Catherine represents the conscience of the decade, and Margaret Thatcher hovers on the sidelines, threatening to make a highly anticipated cameo any moment (New York Times Book Review).
The "pointillist attention to detail makes every character fascinating" (Miami Herald). The characters’ richness—or, rich vacuity—complements Hollinghurst’s exquisite prose and lavish set details; in one scene, Nick comments on art from his drug dealer’s car. But critics couched a few minor complaints amid their effusive praise. Hollinghurst’s homosexuals are all oversensitive, lonely, doomed, and engage in graphic sex. Some critics found the lengthy discourses on culture tedious. Finally, Nick’s four-year lodging at the Freddens, with his secret affairs, often belies reality. Small criticisms, really—this book is deserving of the Booker.
The Line of Beauty is the first novel focused on gay life to win the Booker Prize, yet it does more than glance back at the sometimes frivolous and deadly aspects of London’s gay culture. Hollinghurst, acknowledged as one of his generation’s best writers, is an incisive social and political satirist. With a sly wit, he confirms stereotypes about class, family, society, politics, and sexuality in ‘80s-era London—just like Henry James did for late nineteenth-century New York and European society. Hollinghurst handles serious themes with a light touch—and a soft dose of morality.
What emerges is a remarkable psychological portrait of an era. There’s the obsequious Nick, who can’t deal with power around him, his benumbed lovers, smarmy politicians, and coke dealers. In his previous novels Hollinghurst all but ignored women; here, they come into their own. Rachel possesses a "velvety graciousness lined with steel," Catherine represents the conscience of the decade, and Margaret Thatcher hovers on the sidelines, threatening to make a highly anticipated cameo any moment (New York Times Book Review).
The "pointillist attention to detail makes every character fascinating" (Miami Herald). The characters’ richness—or, rich vacuity—complements Hollinghurst’s exquisite prose and lavish set details; in one scene, Nick comments on art from his drug dealer’s car. But critics couched a few minor complaints amid their effusive praise. Hollinghurst’s homosexuals are all oversensitive, lonely, doomed, and engage in graphic sex. Some critics found the lengthy discourses on culture tedious. Finally, Nick’s four-year lodging at the Freddens, with his secret affairs, often belies reality. Small criticisms, really—this book is deserving of the Booker.
Hollinghurst's first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), won major acclaim and many awards. His latest novel engages similar themes--a young man new to both his sexuality and the manners of high society. Set in London during the early 1980s, the economy is booming, the Tories have just been swept into power, Margaret Thatcher is prime minister, and the country is awash in hope and excitement. Nick Guest, fresh out of Oxford, is staying in London with the Fedden family--whose son, Toby, was Nick's dearest friend at Oxford. The father, Gerald, is a newly elected conservative member of parliament and is infatuated with Thatcher, whom he calls "the Lady." Nick, by his proximity to the Feddens, attends swank parties, packed with MPs, cabinet ministers, and nobility, all of whom harbor the expectation that "the Lady" might appear at any minute. Meanwhile, Nick embarks on two love affairs--first with Leo, a young black London clerk, and later with Wani, a Lebanese millionaire and friend from Oxford. After nights of parties, drugs, sex, and snobbery, scandal--in which Nick plays an unwilling part-- visits the Fedden family. The material and social excesses of the 1980s are deftly portrayed in Alan Hollinghurst's latest success.
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