Britisher Hollinghurst (The Spell, 1998, etc.) isn't shy: At 400-plus pages sprinkled with references to Henry James, his fourth outing aspires to the status of an epic about sex, politics, money, and high society. Though he's best known for his elegant descriptions of gay male life and pitch-perfect prose, Hollinghurst is most striking here for his successful, often damning, observations about the vast divides between the ruling class and everyone else. It's 1983, and narrator Nick Guest, age 20, is literally a guest in the household of Conservative MP Gerald Fedden, whose son, Toby, Nick befriended at Oxford. Given an attic room and loosely assigned the task of looking after the Feddens' unstable manic-depressive daughter Catherine, Nick is given entree into a world of drunken, drug-laced parties at ancestral manors, high-stakes financial transactions, and politicians all obsessed with catching a glimpse of "The Lady"-Thatcher herself (who finally does make a cameo-hilariously-toward the end). Nick pursues his studies in James (though they may seem overkill in a novel already so saturated in the Jamesian) and his search for love-with a young Jamaican office worker, then with a closeted and cokehead Lebanese millionaire-though, as becomes clear, both his scholarship and sexuality are painfully peripheral in the world he's chosen to inhabit. Oddly, Nick is less interesting as a character than as an observer: His youthful affairs do gain gravitas as the '80s progress under the specter of AIDS, but over the story's course he goes from a virginal 20-year-old to a wizened 24-year-old. More fascinating are Hollinghurst's incisive depictions of the brilliance and ease that insulate and animatethe Feddens-especially the witty and difficult Gerald and the spectacular mess that is Catherine.-and the crushing realization that Nick, unlike those around him, does not have the casual luxury to crash up his own life and survive. A beautifully realized portrait of a decade and a social class, but without a well-developed emotional core. Agent: Emma Parry/Fletcher & Parry
A magnificent comedy of manners. Hollinghurst's alertness to the tiniest social and tonal shifts never slackens, and positively luxuriates in a number of unimprovably droll set pieces . . . [an] outstanding novel.” —New York Times Book Review
“In this saga about the Thatcher years Alan Hollinghurst writes harsh but deeply informed social satire from within, just as Proust did. Hollinghurst is never mocking or caricatural but subtly observant and completely participant. He writes the best prose we have today. He brings the eloquence of a George Eliot together with the sexiness and visual acuity of a Nabokov.” —Edmund White
“His finest novel to date.” —Geoff Dyer
“One can't get enough of Hollinghurst's sentences . . . If you value style, wit, and social satire in your reading, don't miss this elegant and passionate novel.” —Washington Post
“Hollinghurst has placed his gay protagonist within a larger social context, and the result is his most tender and powerful novel to date, a sprawling and haunting elegy to the 1980s.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Mr. Hollinghurst's great gift as a novelist is for social satire as sharp and transparent as glass, catching his quarry from an angle just an inch to the left of the view they themselves would catch in the mantelpiece mirror . . . The Line of Beauty is unlikely to be surpassed.” —New York Observer
“Almost perfectly written . . . this novel has the air of a classic.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“An affecting work of art.” —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“Hollinghurst's prose is a genuine achievement-lavish, poised, sinuously alert . . . The Line of Beauty is an ample and sophisticate delight, charged with hundreds of delicate impressions and insignts, and scores of vital and lovely sentences. It is at once domestic and political, psychological and historical. It is funny, moving, and finally despairing.” —New Republic
“Line for line, Hollinghurst's novel about London during the 1980s is the most exquisitely written book I've read in years. Witty observations about politics, society, and family open like little revelations on every page.” —Christian Science Monitor
“[A] masterpiece with a skillfully rendered social panorama, a Proustian alertness to social nuance and a stylistic precision that recalls [James].” —Newsday
“A rueful, snapshot-accurate portrait of this era.” —Seattle Times
“The Line of Beauty is itself a thing of beauty-an elegant and seductive novel . . . readers will hang on every bracing word. The Line of Beauty may perhaps be the author's most mature and accomplished work to date. It might also be his best.” —Philadelphia City Paper
“An intoxicating read . . . each sentence in this book rings as perfect and true as a Schubert sonata.” —Hartford Courant
“A deliciously snarky portrait of Thatcherite Britain, but Hollinghurst also makes you believe in his characters, and nobody produced better prose this year.” —San Jose Mercury News
Nick is a Jamesian scholar, obsessed with aesthetic beauty, who is coming of age against the backdrop of Thatcher-era England. He's an outsider--gay, living with the wealthy family of an Oxford mate whose father, Gerald, is a Tory MP--and often doesn't engage with the world around him so much as observe it. Alex Jennings's smooth, pleasant voice easily conveys Nick's internal observations, as well as all the class distinctions of a large cast of British characters--Gerald's upper-crust brusqueness; decadent Wani's lazy drawl; the Caribbean-tinged accent of Leo, Nick's first male lover. Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning novel is compelling, and Jennings navigates the waters of national, personal, and sexual politics with ease. J.M.D. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
