Why I picked it up: I’m a sucker for an award-winner. And I’ve been meaning to read him ever since his first book, The Swimming-Pool Library, got such great reviews for a first novel.
We don’t pay enough attention these days to how novels are structured. It’s a forgotten art, really, to make the actual shape of your novel — the chapters and sections, the events on which you hang your denouements and epiphanies — match the theme. But Hollinghurst does it beautifully. Writes it beautifully. Not only the structure but the wit and sly satire — so you don’t like The Line of Beauty
The novel uses as its liefmotif (how’s that for some high school English coming back) the ogee. This is an architectural and design term referring to a particular kind of curve — a lazy S-curve really. Here are some examples in architecture and here’s another in design. Even though it appears to be structurally important to a building, it is merely decorative and not weight-bearing at all. There is a fascinating duality about curve with the concave and convex in tension with each other. It’s a very classic English look (borrowed from the Middle East) — elegant, old and surprisingly delicate for all that it’s been carved in stone. For Nick, Hollinghurst’s narrator — “[t]he double curve was Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty,’ the snakelike flicker of an instinct, of two compulsions held in one unfolding moment.”
And Nick spends his days in the hunt of that perfect line of beauty. The perfect Jamesian phrase, the perfect family, the perfect curve of a lover’s lower back. And in theory, he’s in the perfect place to do it. London in the 1980s. God, the 80s. Was there ever a time when so much glittering beauty and power hid such seeds of self-destruction? A manic, gilded age where political, social and economic fortunes could be built overnight and yet the center could not hold. People collected beauty not because they appreciated it but because they could own it. The indiscriminate sex while men are dying of AIDS, the half-assed production companies that produce no films or publishing companies that only produce one magazine issue, the line of cocaine on an 18th century Georgian desk, the lie of the model marriage, the duplicity and the corruption. The perfect line of beauty could not maintain its equilibrium.
Basic plot in marketing copy prose: After his graduation from Oxford, Nick Guest (get it?) moves in with the Feddens — a political family on the move in Thatcher’s Tory London. An self-proclaimed aesthete, Nick intersects closely with the Feddens and their social set, wealthy Tories who control much of the economic and political power during the dizzying years that marked the apex of the 1980s. Hungering for beauty, Nick moves from outsider to insider, from an earnest first love to a debached playboy millionaire, from guest to family until the moment when those opposing forces can no longer be held against each other.
But here’s what it’s really about: Class and power — economic, social and political — in 1980s London. And about loving things just because we find them beautiful. And about the “two compulsions” that are held against each other — beauty and ugliness, desire and disgust, power and and weakness — which make up the structure of our relationships with each other and ourselves. And about how the 1980s were — for all of their gilt and glitter — ugly and empty and shallow.
Random yet representative quote: It came to Nick in a flash of acute nostalgia, as though he could never visit that scene of happiness again. He waited a minute longer, in the heightened singleness of someone who had slipped out for a minute from a class, a meeting, ears still ringing, face still solemn, into another world of quiet corridors, the neutral gleam of the day. He couldn’t unwind the line of beauty for Catherine, because it explained almost everything and to her it would seem a trivial delusion, it would seem mad, as she said.
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