The Line of Beauty

Name: The Line of Beauty
Author: Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst · 2004

Nick Guest lives in a Tory MP's Notting Hill house during the Thatcher years, navigating class, cocaine, and gay London. Hollinghurst won the Booker in 2004 with a novel that is both a social comedy of manners and an AIDS elegy. The prose is gorgeous and exact. Henry James filtered through 1980s hedonism, which sounds unlikely but works.

The case against

on the length
“There were a couple of sections that could have been edited for length”
a book blog
on the coke scenes
“How many times do we need to read a passage describing furtive coke-snorting”
a book blog
on Nick himself
“Oddly, Nick is less interesting as a character than as an observer”
Kirkus Reviews, 2004
on part two’s opening
“there’s not much that’s brilliant about the chapter that starts this section”
a book blog