Buy The Line of Beauty

The Line of Beauty

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Synopsis

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.

As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this U.K. bestseller is a major work by one of our finest writers.

Review

Hollinghurst's fourth novel is exquisite on every level. As gay storytelling, it charts the four-year arc of 20-year-old Nick Guest's sexual coming of age - from virgin in love with his closest straight friend, to lover of a man dying of AIDS - with passion and compassion. As political commentary, it eviscerates the economic cruelty of the 1980s reign of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Maiden, with sharp insight and unambiguous loathing. As social satire, it eyeballs the born-to-the-manor insouciance of the wealthy and well connected (conservative both with their emotions and in their politics) with unsparing perception and elegant wit. The writing is poised and pitch-perfect, Proustian in its elegance and Jamesian in its eloquence; The Line of Beauty is tragic and comic, breezy and deep, so very queer and yet impeccably mainstream. It's as close to dazzling as a book can be. (Along with Colm Toibin's The Master, based on the life of Henry James, Hollinghurst's book was one of six finalists for Britain's prestigious Man Booker prize - prestigious, plus the winner gets about $95,000.)

Richard Labonte, Books to Watch Out For