Hollinghurst...cleverly and subtly plays the English novelist of whom he most disapproves off against the one he most favors without losing anything. His own natural tendency to create an apolitical society, where aesthetic arguments are punctuated by sexual athletics, now allows an opposing force deeply inimical to his imagination, which insists on public life, the trappings of power, as the natural subject of the novel … The novel moves forward in a series of brilliant set scenes, pieces of atmosphere, moods sharply described and delineated. The plot, such as it is, deals with the enrichment of Nick’s experience, his moving from snobbish provincial to uneasy cosmopolitan, his close observing of the rich and the ruling class, his experiences with drugs, sex, and high art.
The Line of Beauty is told in the third person, but everything is filtered through a single consciousness, Nick’s: we see things as he sees them, so there is no logistical reason for the novel not to have been in the first person. It isn’t, however, partly because it’s more Jamesian not to be; and also because Nick is an actor on a public stage as well as an individual with a private life … Nick holds an uncertain position in the world he moves in: he is there because the others want him to be; he isn’t wealthy enough to survive on his own. What he has to offer is a refined aesthetic sense, the ability to appreciate in elegant sentences the beautiful things that the people around him are able to buy. He doesn’t make beautiful things himself, but he does, by the way that he sees them, make things beautiful.
Moralist that he is, Hollinghurst generally prefers to proceed through subtle modulations of irony, slipping in a dagger rather than wielding a cutlass. This treatment is as true for Nick as for the cast of grandees and gargoyles among whom he moves. His ambivalent character is a vehicle for the novel's central tension – between private conscience and public display … Although it gathers ominously in mood, The Line of Beauty feels more blissful than baleful in its anatomy of the era because it is, among other things, a magnificent comedy of manners. Hollinghurst's alertness to the tiniest social and tonal shifts never slackens, and positively luxuriates in a number of unimprovably droll set pieces.
Hollinghurst interlaces three different plots – a Condition of England novel set during the Thatcher era of the 1980s, a Jamesian psychological inquiry cum social comedy about the well-to-do Fedden family and their friends, and a gay coming-of-age story … Throughout Nick remains the center of consciousness, always sympathetic, even as he grows increasingly coarse in his sexual sophistication (and taste for cocaine). What makes the book so fine, though, is its writing -- suffused with enough wit to keep the diction original and lively without overpowering the reader with campiness or excess … Hollinghurst is, in general, singularly adept at choosing just the right words, making unexpected observations and pulling off neat rhetorical gestures. One can, in fact, enjoy The Line of Beauty just for its lines of beauty.
Line for line, Hollinghurst's novel about London during the 1980s is the most exquisitely written book I've read in years. Witty observations about politics, society, and family open like little revelations on every page … It's also an explicitly gay novel. Not just a novel with some gay characters, comfortably on the side or reduced to floppy antics, à la Will and Grace. Hollinghurst rarely strays far from his protagonist's sexual fantasies and exploits … As AIDS ravages the gay community and scandal rocks the Fedden household, Nick finds himself as abandoned as he ever feared, and the compensation of beauty seems heartbreakingly tragic.
...a tale that is plangent and funny and perfectly written … The pressure and fizz of all this social collusion makes The Line of Beauty an intoxicating read … As Nick evolves from a virgin naif to a coke-addled party boy with a millionaire Lebanese boyfriend, The Line of Beauty becomes less a study of class than one about how those on the margins of Thatcherite London were tainted by that period's ecstatic vacuity … Hollinghurst has always been compared with the world's best stylists, but he truly enters a category all his own with The Line of Beauty. It takes a delicate hand to poke fun at the fetishizing of style while being stylish oneself, but Hollinghurst pulls it off. Each sentence in this book rings as perfect and true as a Schubert sonata.
The 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.
The story may focus on the uneasy coexistence among different classes and races in the middle of the Thatcher era in England, but the times themselves are the central character. On the surface – and, make no mistake, the significance of surface is more than superficial here – the setting seems obvious and apt … The world of the upper classes is unsafely sheltered within a bubble of self-delusion, and the greatest self-delusion of all is that somehow their rank and privilege will protect them, not just from AIDS but also from the social, political and moral decay that their studied class indifference has wrought.
Privilege and parasitism, bluster and bigotry, cocaine bingeing and stock-market finagling ... they're all here. And it sure doesn't hurt that Hollinghurst is one of the best writers of party scenes since F. Scott Fitzgerald … Hollinghurst is a dab hand at weaving these multiple strands of Nick's life together, and he knows exactly how to build tension through incisive character portrayal. Catherine and Wani are temperamental time-bombs, in constant danger of detonation. Thatcher is an éminence grise who might just make an appearance in the book. AIDS is a threat about to hit Nick's circle. Tory eagerness to ‘get public services back into private hands’ as quickly as possible seems bound to produce some fallout of its own.
The Line of Beauty is a sumptuous, if prolix, portrait of dissolute 1980s London, when greed and power bespoke glamour and privilege … Some of the passages, particularly when characters launch into discourses on culture, seem interminable. The descriptions are always lush, the repartee is always droll (very British), but they can be soporific … The Line of Beauty is carried throughout by Hollinghurst's exquisite prose and authorial restraint. He withholds moral judgment, not letting his narrative stoop to invective or mere satire.
Hollinghurst is most striking here for his successful, often damning, observations about the vast divides between the ruling class and everyone else … Oddly, Nick is less interesting as a character than as an observer: His youthful affairs do gain gravitas as the ’80s progress under the specter of AIDS, but over the story’s course he goes from a virginal 20-year-old to a wizened 24-year-old … A beautifully realized portrait of a decade and a social class, but without a well-developed emotional core.
