My good friend Garth, writer, rocker, and erstwhile purveyor of Hot Face wrote in with his favorite read of the year.
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst — Callow young aesthete Nick Guest is a devotee of late-period Henry James, whose style, he says, “conceals things and reveals things.” In Alan Hollinghurst’s portrait of politics, money, and sex in Thatcher-era London, style reveals more than it conceals. Among the revelations this preposterously well-written novel offers, in the end: that there’s a little Nick Guest in all of us, that aestheticism is not just a superficial flight from the deeper world but a kind of fumbling toward it, and that Hollinghurst is a novelist of rare gifts. Here he almost single-handedly bridges the divide between the novel of society and the novel of the self, combining the former’s imaginative sprawl, objectivity, moral exactitude, and attentiveness with the latter’s searing emotional investment in its subject. The Line Of Beauty is by turns charming, voyeuristic, sentimental, merciless, witty, affecting, austere, and graphic. Throughout, it is a triumph on par with Brideshead Revisited, Remembrance of Things Past, or the works of the Master himself.
C. Max Magee
created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.
