The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2004)

I am frankly surprised at the acclaim attached to this novel: it won the Man Booker Prize in 2004 and was recently named by a BBC poll of writers and critics as one of the 20 best novels so far of the 21st Century. It seems to me, however, to be more than a bit schizophrenic, a sophisticated novel of manners thrown together with a much more earthy coming-of-age story filled with drug usage and gay sex. The two styles and stories just do not seem to fit together very well.

The novel takes place during the 1980s reign of Margaret Thatcher, among the rich and powerful of England. The protagonist, Nick Guest, is an outsider looking in, a middle-class house guest of his upper-class friend from Oxford. While being obviously filled with envy about the fame and the beautiful possessions of his wealthy friends, Nick is also able to observe their hypocrisy and pretensions from close at hand. The resulting situations allow Hollinghurst to release his inner Henry James in witty accounts of various conversations and social encounters. The prose used in describing these experiences is elegant and satirical.

On the other hand, the account of Nick's private life of sex and drugs is narrated in s very graphic manner, in language which seems more pornographic than literary. Nick's personal story seems to be from another book entirely, differing both in style and intent. It is possible (maybe even probable) that the juxtaposition of the two disparate styles is designed to emphasize the gulf between the public pretensions and the private realities during a time of excesses. But still....

Hollinghurst does an outstanding job of following in the footsteps of Henry James, so much so that I have the same opinion about his work as I do about The Master's -- the characters are so emotionally passive and remote that I find it impossible to become involved in their lives, however exquisitely they are portrayed.