Washington Blade - December 17, 2004

"THE LINE OF BEAUTY," the 438-page new novel set in England in the '80s by the highly regarded gay English writer Alan Hollinghurst, has all the makings of a literary treat: gorgeous writing, beautiful young men, send-ups of the rich and famous, great dinner parties, fabulous houses, sex and drugs.

Unfortunately, this book, which won the Booker Prize, a prestigious British literary award, in October, has two major problems that make reading it a chore rather than a pleasure. Its characters often seem like caricatures, and it's way too long. The volume's numerous, repetitive descriptions of country house parties, sexual encounters and cocaine snorting become as exciting as singing "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" all the way through.

In 1983, 20-year-old aesthete Nick Guest, who is newly out but sexually innocent, moves into an attic room in the London home of the Feddens, an upper-class, well-connected English family.

Gerald Fedden is a conservative member of Parliament. His loyal wife Rachel comes from the wealthy English aristocracy. Their daughter Catherine is bi-polar (she has manic depression). Nick becomes connected to the Feddens through his friendship with their straight son Toby, who was his classmate at Oxford.

When the novel begins, it is the Margaret Thatcher era. The stock market is booming, the streets are paved in sex and cocaine, and AIDS is not yet on the horizon. It's easier to be gay than it was pre-Stonewall, let alone the time of Oscar Wilde.

But homosexuality is still a secret to be shared mainly with other queers, hip intellectuals and artistic types, rather than with one's family or the general public.

NICK, WHO COMES from a middle-class background, has had little experience with the world. His experience with gay life is of the aesthetic variety. He likes opera and is writing his thesis about his literary idol Henry James, who is believed by some to have been a repressed gay man.

Nick's age of innocence ends when he meets Leo, a black working class Jamaican clerk, through a personal ad. His affair with Leo introduces him to the gay scene.

After having sex for the first time with Leo, Hollinghurst writes, "Nick felt abruptly heavy-hearted, and felt perhaps he had been silly to let Leo see how happy he was - he couldn't stifle his sense of achievement, and his love-starved mind and body wanted more and more of Leo. The air seemed to jostle with nothing but the presence and names of Leo and Nick, which hung as a sad sharp chemical tang of knowledge among the sleeping laurels and azaleas."

Nick moves on from Leo to the seductions of other lovers and to cocaine.

Later, he enters a relationship with 25-year-old Wani, the only son of a Lebanese immigrant who made millions in the grocery business. As the book and the '80s progress, Leo and Wani both become ill with AIDS. Gerald becomes entangled in a scandal, and Catherine's mental illness worsens.

But many readers will not care much about any of this because, for most of "The Line of Beauty," the characters, gay or straight, are so two-dimensional.

Leo, like most of the working class characters in the book, seems more a stereotypical cardboard cutout than a human being in 3-D. And Wani is a spoiled, rich pretty boy.

They're all cartoons. Gerald is the typical hypocritical politician, and Rachel's the wife who's blind to his peccadilloes. Toby is the dutiful son, and Catherine is the perceptive, but crazy person.

The novel's touching conclusion contains some of the most beautiful language to be found in modern literature. But it's not worth sifting through repetitious descriptions or living with fictional stereotypes to get to it. There are enough of those in real life.

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