PositiveLondon Review of BooksThe best parts of Horizon are like a carefully constructed mosaic ... you hardly know what you’ll be reading about from page to page ... Lopez packs his pages like the hold of a cargo plane, with everything strapped down, aisles between, and labelled. The argument is sometimes fleeting, and Horizon is a less focused book than Arctic Dreams, but it has a definite design—like that of a garden ... The book’s style acts out its therapeutic aim: a battle against despair ... Horizon is full of small miscommunications, unasked questions, odd tensions between Lopez and his scientific colleagues ... In every section something unnerves him[.]
Alan Hollinghurst
PositiveThe Los Angeles TimesThe line of beauty is decadence. The novel begins in 1983, with the Tory landslide that consolidated Margaret Thatcher's rule, the explosion of AIDS and the financial boom, facilitated by Thatcherism, that Gerald Fedden and his milieu term "the Big Bang" … It is not AIDS but Nick's failure to deal with power, or truly befriend those in power, that makes The Line of Beauty. Nick's ogee serves as an expression of sickness and death but cannot withstand Gerald, whom he needed as a kind of father for his new, cosmopolitan life … For Nick, Henry James is less an influence than a talisman. Nick has not mastered his milieu as James did; he has tragically overestimated it. He would like to have the opportunity to be ambiguous, but his situation is glaringly clear.
