The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst · 2004
Nick Guest lives in a Tory MP's Notting Hill house during the Thatcher years, navigating class, cocaine, and gay London. Hollinghurst won the Booker in 2004 with a novel that is both a social comedy of manners and an AIDS elegy. The prose is gorgeous and exact. Henry James filtered through 1980s hedonism, which sounds unlikely but works.
The case against
Nick Guest watches, appraises, and rarely acts, which is the point and also the problem: five hundred pages in the company of a passive aesthete among Tories the novel openly despises. The satire shoots fish in a Notting Hill barrel. Hollinghurst's Jamesian sentences are exquisite, and exquisite at a length where languor starts reading as airlessness.
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