pileofgreybooks: a book ring

A totally different kind of first-person narrative is offered in Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library. Hollinghurst, an English novelist, has been relegated to the "gay fiction" shelves until this year when he finally crossed over and won the Booker for The Line of Beauty. This novel is his first and it is masterful, incredibly engrossing and written in an arch, richly embroidered prose that's sort of a sexier version of Henry James. The subject is sex and there's lots of it described in this book -- random sex with men that the narrator picks up in clubs and trains and lavatories. It's pretty hot, but also psychologically astute. Our narrator is a beautiful English aristocrat in his mid-twenties in 1980s London, who lives off family money and spends his days working out and indolently satisfying his carnal desires. Along with his own sexual escapades, the book recounts his interactions with an 80-year old eccentric gay noble who adopts the young man as his prospective biographer. The stories of these two men's lives start to intertwine beautifully and Hollinghurst offers a melancholy, bittersweet portrait of homosexual culture throughout the 20th Century, existing on the margins both because of societal stigma and individual preference. It explores the beauty and the pain inherent in both men's desires and their dissatisfactions. It's an incredibly accomplished piece of writing that unfortunately ends rather perfunctorially when one wishes that the story would just go on and on. Hollinghurst has a hynotic way of telling his story, jumping from bit to bit and giving us just what we need. He doesn't underline obvious parallels or motives in a scenario (old man passing his traditions on to younger man) that could come off as sentimental. The book is elegant and erotic in the truest sense .