BOOKENDS: The Gay Novel Goes Mainstream—But Are Readers Ready?

Depending on your choice of friends, bookstores, magazines and professors, you may have heard that the novel is ailing, dying, or dead.

If so, rest easy: you have been misinformed. “The Line of Beauty,” by Alan Hollinghurst, was last year’s undeniable proof that truly magnificent novels are still alive and kicking—or, in the case of “The Line,” singing.

And if any doubt about the vitality of the novel lingers in your mind, such skepticism will be washed away next Friday, Oct. 28, when Hollinghurst reads from “The Line” at the Brattle Theatre at 6 p.m.

The novel carries readers through 1980s London, a period which—for narrator-hero Nick Guest—is cataclysmic on two fronts: first, as a young and privileged Englishman in the dizzying boom-and bust-climate of Thatcherism; second, as a gay man at the dawn of the AIDS crisis. Such high-stakes political, moral, and social issues could easily overpower a less skillful writer, turning the novel into mere sermon or satire. But Hollinghurst and his fictitious alter-ego are far too smart for that.

Instead, we meet a brilliant, insecure Oxford grad with an exacting, reverential, and eventually obsessive eye for beauty, whether found in the heights of a Gothic cathedral, the curves of his first lover, Leo, or the electric rush of cocaine. He finds it quite often in the work of his hero, Henry James. The consciously Jamesian touches of both Nick and the novel itself—the hero at once inside and outside a society, the incisive but never-misanthropic critic, the genuine appreciation of beauty, money, and power—all lend Hollinghurst’s plot and characters a sense of historical and cultural depth.

Not that there isn’t enough to hold our attention in the plot’s present. The never-ending whirl of parties and holidays, buoyed on a golden wash of champagne over barely concealed nervous breakdowns, has enough energy to propel the book on its own.

Lending a delicate counterpoint to the glitter and noise, the supremely articulate yet supremely uncertain Nick drifts on the current, avoiding neither the glare of his hosts’ spotlights nor the murk of their secret shames. As his surname implies, Nick is forever a “Guest”: a creature of thresholds, of spare bedrooms just slightly under-furnished, of borrowed clothes and borrowed friends, always made much of but never quite belonging.

Like the subject of a Renaissance portrait whose eyes or hands are deliberately enlarged to appear more lifelike, Nick has the uncanny air of being both more and less human than the rest of us. The novel’s three-part division, following the narrator in 1983, 1986, and 1987, shows his consciousness at distinct stages of development. Nick becomes smoother, more jaded, and less likeable. He also becomes more tragic—and thus more loveable.

Several points in “The Line of Beauty,” most notably the end, are tear-worthy, but the novel is no vanitas piece or memento mori. Hollinghurst once wrote that elegy is “the dominant and inevitable genre of gay fiction.” Yet elegy celebrates life while marking death, and in “The Line of Beauty,” life abounds, enthralls, and intoxicates.

And besides, “The Line of Beauty” deserves more than the niche-market label of “gay fiction.” Sadly, Hollinghurst’s novels to date remain largely unknown to American readers because of glib classifications that put his works such as “The Swimming-Pool Library” and “The Folding Star” on the “special interest” shelf of gay and lesbian lit. True, all his novels feature gay sexuality and romance. And squeamish readers, beware: “The Line” is peppered with vivid eroticism. But then again, enjoyment of Jane Austen is not restricted to upper-middle-class bachelorettes, or Faulkner to Southerners.

At home in Great Britain, Hollinghurst and “The Line of Beauty” have earned greater acclaim, including the 2004 Man Booker Prize. Whereas the gay classification has arguably narrowed Hollinghurst’s following in the United States, it has only provoked wider interest among British readers. When “The Swimming-Pool Library,” published in 1988, fell under England’s “Section 28” law censoring art that “promotes homosexuality,” its sales soared in defiance.

Luckily, Hollinghurst’s current visit to the U.S. offers American readers a second chance to discover his work. With a paperback edition now available on this side of the puddle, let’s hope that–after shying away from Hollinghurst in the past–American readers will now be ready for “The Line.”

—Staff writer Laura E. Kolbe can be reached at lkolbe@fas.harvard.edu.