The Line of Beauty
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.
Four years of an unfinished thesis and the Feddens’ hospitality leave Nick with no plan and no urgency, so readers are given nothing to want on his behalf. The sex and the cocaine recur past the point of purpose, and one reader finally asks, “How many times do we need to know this?” There are “far too many secondary characters to keep track of” across 450 pages, and detractors find them “ciphers, randomly assembled collections of attributes,” with names like Nick Guest and Julius Money. The sharper objection is that Leo and the book’s other Black characters arrive sexualised before they arrive human.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
