The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

book data

1,513 ratings, 3.50 average rating, 234 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		20%
4		33%
3		27%
2		13%
1		5%

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published

2004 by Bloomsbury Publishing

binding

Paperback, 438 pages

literary awards

Booker Prize Winner 2004; 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

isbn

0739464469 (isbn13: 9780739464465)

description

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament ...more

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Booker Prize Winners

42 books | 248 voters

Best Gay Fiction

111 books | 86 voters

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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 2,325)

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07/11/07

Yulia rated it:

bookshelves: gay-lit

Read in January, 2006

An unusually powerful and deserving winner of the Man Book Prize, this is one of the few books that took me over a year to read, not because it was ever boring or sluggish, but because each sentence was so beautiful, I wanted to give every passage its due attention. I rarely say such things about books, so Hollinghurst must be a magician or a hypnotist. As it took me so long to read, I spent an embarrassing amount of time repeating to people who asked me what I was reading that it was Line of ...more

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4 comments

07/30/07

L rated it:

bookshelves: aids, booker-prize, glbt-interest, novels

Read in August, 2007

I'd been meaning to look into Hollinghurst for years, ever since I read an exuberant review of The Swimming Pool Library... by a writer whose opinion I respected but whom I can't remember now. Martin Amis, maybe? I want to say John Updike, but given the controversy over his New Yorker review of Hollinghurst's later The Spell, I'm not sure I could handle the irony.

In any case, I always look for Swimming Pool Library in book stores, but they never seem to carry it. So finally I got th...more

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06/19/07

David rated it:

Read in November, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

AWARD WINNING CAST REUNITED FOR 'THE LINE OF BEAUTY' ADAPTATION.

(HOLLYWOOD, Nov 25, 2007)

Academy Award winning producer Alan Ball announced today that he has reunited most of the cast of Six Feet Under for an HBO production of the award-winning English novel, "The Line of Beauty."

The 12 episode mini-series will tell the story of Nick Guest ("David Fisher"), a young homosexual who has managed to con his wa...more

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04/03/07

Sreevatsa Kota rated it:

(review of isbn 1582346100)

Read this book to appreciate the writer's unparalleled mastery of the language and an enviable genius that he possesses at getting across his fiery dazzling display of ideas. His expression is exceedingly rich, thick and creamy like a sizeable chunk of delectable chocolate cake that you shovel into your mouth and allow it to tease and tantalise those tastebuds before it iniquitously melts away into the obcurity of your mouth leaving you quarter-miffed and three-quarters craving more.

...more Read this book to appreciate the writer's unparalleled mastery of the language and an enviable genius that he possesses at getting across his fiery dazzling display of ideas. His expression is exceedingly rich, thick and creamy like a sizeable chunk of delectable chocolate cake that you shovel into your mouth and allow it to tease and tantalise those tastebuds before it iniquitously melts away into the obcurity of your mouth leaving you quarter-miffed and three-quarters craving more.

Be that as it may, the book sags and crawls ponderously for the most part under its own stodgy weight making it pointless and vapid. The plot is found grossly wanting in humour and wherever there seems to exist a suggestion of it, it is perceived as either unimpressively wry or inconsequentially droll.

Perhaps the most painfully striking feature of the narrative is its disjointedness which makes the reader very restive as if to want to somehow quickly piece together the disparate components of a seemingly unending puzzle in order to get it over with. This aspect is also one which more than once irks the reader.

Quite plainly, but for the author's liberal and unnecessary use of excruciating magniloquence and highfalutin phraseology, as it were, in the book, there's nothing else about the book that might be worth reading and it still remains to me a very great mystery as to what it is about this Man Booker winning book that has enthralled the Booker panel of judges. It is anything but entertaining or absorbing- two of the more expected attributes of any book; most definitely those of a Booker Prize winner.

Having said that, in the same breath, the most comfortable quality of this book appears to be its pliant plot- you would not have to fret about losing track if you did not have the time to sit through it without putting it down at one rapid foolish go- in fact it does everything to afford you that luxury- it is certainly not unputdownnable, mark my words.

To sum, pick up the book and leaf through it to sample it at your own risk and decide for yourself if you have made a mistake in buying it or what had come over the Booker panel to have selected it for the prestigious prize.(less)

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05/06/08

Kimberly rated it:

Read in May, 2008

Be Forewarned. This well-written society critique and winner of the 2004 Man Booker prize will bore the pants off you unless you are deeply interested in class struggle, gayness, politics, ethnicity, and AIDs, (the intersection of) in England in the mid-to-late 80s. Oh, and antiques. Talk about a niche!

It was one of two books I brought on my 20 hour flight to Singapore, where I was planning on enjoying, at long last, some time to myself to read. About 50 pages into it, my mind cried,...more

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03/13/09

Alex rated it:

Read in March, 2009

I enjoyed this enormously. Hollinghurst is a great stylist and his debt to Henry James, suggested throughout (the protagonist is writing a thesis on 'The Master'), is always evident. Best of all is his subtle but uncompromising social satire: few of the characteres are particularly sympathetic but all are energetically realised and very believable. There are some terrific set-pieces: an aristocratic twenty-first birthday, awkward introductions of gay lovers to parents who don't know (or won't ad...more

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10/07/08

Becky rated it:

Read in September, 2008

All that sex is, frankly, exhausting and never quite satisfying to either character or reader.

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02/28/08

David rated it:

Read in September, 2006

The gay Great Gatsby in Thacher's England. Also, the best book I've read in years.

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02/17/09

Heather Kemp rated it:

Read in September, 2008

The preemptive assumption of this novel is that Nick is an innocent in the ways of the world--in regards to politics, finance, and romance. The author sets up this character to be seemingly sterotypically innocent describing that everything in life comes to him as a shock. Throughout the book you see that, although Nick is innocent to the "evils" that lurk behind the corporate power structure and elite of society, and never quite knows the proper thing to say, neither does anyone else....more The preemptive assumption of this novel is that Nick is an innocent in the ways of the world--in regards to politics, finance, and romance. The author sets up this character to be seemingly sterotypically innocent describing that everything in life comes to him as a shock. Throughout the book you see that, although Nick is innocent to the "evils" that lurk behind the corporate power structure and elite of society, and never quite knows the proper thing to say, neither does anyone else. The dialogue in this book is scant, and you get the feeling that people are never truly communicating. Toward the end of the book, after the scandal has broken and their personal lives are reeling, people begin to let out their true feelings, and they still aren't saying the right things or understanding what the situation truly calls for.

Throughout the novel Nick has an obsessive internal monologue inside his head, it comes off as irritating at first (so tedious with his constant self-doubts), but you then are lulled to a place where you wonder if that's what you seem like to others, if you come off as tedious and self-loathing. If you're not one who leans toward insecurity then you have to compare yourself to the bombastic and self-absorbed character of Gerald. What Hollinghurst has done is set up charicatures of life--the outsider, the power-hungry, the spoiled elite--and you learn from them that you don't want to be like them. The idea of charicatures is brought up throughout the book as the family has a gallery of photos in their kitchen, and the author reminds you that these people are frozen in time as their larger-than-life personalities.

There are references to the effects of power and money on people, on the way they think and interact with one another. The manic/depressive daughter, Catherine, is led to be the narrator's true voice in this work, calling the upwardly mobile in Parliament "Monsters" rather than "Ministers," and doing her part to call a spade a spade. Catherine ends up being the catalyst that sparks the climax of the book--igniting the public scandal merely by telling the truth. Although Hollinghurst (and the publishers of the book) want you to think this book is about the effects of power and wealth, it's more about the simple truths--are secrets personal or impersonal?

The title of the book, The Line of Beauty, is referenced several times throughout the book, and Nick's quest for beauty in his surroundings and lovers is contantly used to reinforce this idea of what is true beauty. In one ironic use of the phrase Hollinghurst describes a line of cocaine (which is prolific through the last 2/3 of the book) as a line of beauty to Nick. Bringing the reader around, slowly but surely, to realize the age-old truth that beauty can be found anywhere that genuine experiences are had with genuine people.

All in all this was a good book, definitely deserving of prestigious British award of The Man Booker Prize in 2004. I decided upon a B+ rating because the author gets a little heavy-handed, his voice slightly intrusive into the reader's process, and the book is written in such a specific time and a specific place that it looses a touch of its meaning to contemporary readers who didn't fully experience the decadence and pretensions of the 1980's. (less)

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09/16/08

Eric rated it:

(review of isbn 1582345082)

bookshelves: favorites

Read in September, 2008

Excellent in every respect. Reading this, I often felt to be in masterly hands: Hollinghurst has that completeness of play, that perfect union of the dramatic and the psychological. He does the scenic work of artfully describing characters' interplay of gestures and tones and tics, but is just as adept amidst the impalpables of sensibility, where the motives for their gestures and tones and tics are found to lie. Hollinghurst has superb senses for texture, heft, sound, movement. The old James a...more Excellent in every respect. Reading this, I often felt to be in masterly hands: Hollinghurst has that completeness of play, that perfect union of the dramatic and the psychological. He does the scenic work of artfully describing characters' interplay of gestures and tones and tics, but is just as adept amidst the impalpables of sensibility, where the motives for their gestures and tones and tics are found to lie. Hollinghurst has superb senses for texture, heft, sound, movement. The old James advice to be one "on whom nothing is lost" remains central.

My one quibble is with the plotting, and with the various burdens of plot-advancement each character must bear. The scandalous denouement, the shameful secret-spilling that wraps up the book, is brought about by Catherine, the sister of Nick's undergrad crush Toby. Toby is the predictable Hetero Golden Boy Athlete, dull and style-less and unconscious of his allure, but Catherine is worse--Hollinghurst is lazy, or seems to be at a loss, and just opts to make her a typical Hysterical Female, a manic-depressive Poor Little Rich Girl who does drugs, makes impertinent comments at the dinner table, and dates roguish unsuitables to shock her parents. Nick, and his lovers Leo and Wani are so much more complex creations, and so much more important to the book, that it didn't bother me that Catherine was so banal and badly done--just as long as she was irrelevant. But then Hollinghurst uses her to bring about the big stuff at the end--she does something so much more malicious and deranged than anything she's done before. Her behavior is so implausible because Hollinghurst has given us no sense of what deep issues with her father and family would have made her act as she does. One can't skimp on the psychology of a character if that psychology is what turns the plot of the novel.

The book could have gotten along without so much of the Feddens, really. They provide the frame, the setting, and their small bag of traits and attitudes are sufficiently well shuffled and deployed as to make convincing characters--but Hollinghurst didn't really need to shift his focus back to them at the end. Wani's downward spiral, and Leo's death, are absorbing and heartbreaking enough. When I think of Leo on his bike I almost cry. (less)

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08/31/07

Shanley rated it:

Read in January, 2008

Finally finished... the plot started to pick up -or rather, the author found the plot- in the last third of the book or so, but that was 300+ pages in. Painful.

The writing was supposed to by lyrical and graceful, but it was just long-winded and poorly executed. For beautiful prose, this book tries but does not hit the mark. The author needed a better editor, one who loves the delete key. It may be because I have been reading this book sporadically over the past year or more, but at ...more

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04/27/07

Dustin rated it:

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in December, 2006

recommends it for: young homos and the people that love them

It's been a while (and by a while, I don't mean a certain number of months, but a certain number of a certain kind of months) since I read this book. But I wanted to say at least this:

The Line of Beauty contains some of the most beautiful passages in fiction I've read in, well, my life. The book is rich, thick and overflowing. Meanwhile things come across well-placed, timed, pertinent.

It's gay fiction for gays who love reading (and not just for gays who love reading about...more

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02/05/09

Bookmarks Magazine added it (review of isbn 1582345082)

The Line of Beauty is the first novel focused on gay life to win the Booker Prize, yet it does more than glance back at the sometimes frivolous and deadly aspects of London's gay culture. Hollinghurst, acknowledged as one of his generation's best writers, is an incisive social and political satirist. With a sly wit, he confirms stereotypes about class, family, society, politics, and sexuality in _�80s-era London__just like Henry James did for late nineteenth-century New York and European society

...more

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05/21/09

Becky rated it:

Read in December, 2008

Oh man. I hate this book. I was full of dismay when it appeared, glowing brightly on the updated version of the 1001 books list. I read it a couple of years ago, and it made me froth at the mouth. I figured I'd give it a second chance, maybe discover some of the apparently wonderful humour it's supposed to contain, an extra level of satire I'd somehow missed.

But no. Maybe I just don't get it. There isn't a single character I feel anything but revulsion for in this novel. The way in w...more

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04/23/09

Milan/zzz Ranisavljevic rated it:

(review of isbn 0330483218)

bookshelves: awarded, glbt

Read in April, 2006

Oh what a magnificent novel; I'm absolutely delighted. I could say that this is one of the best novels I've read recently and once again Booker Prize Winner has justified its fame.

On the other hand this novel is one of the strangest novels I've read recently. Friend asked me could I recommend him this book and what is all about and I couldn't reply. First I don't have a clue who'll accept it in the way I did and the answer on the second question is confusing (for myself too) because ...more Oh what a magnificent novel; I'm absolutely delighted. I could say that this is one of the best novels I've read recently and once again Booker Prize Winner has justified its fame.

On the other hand this novel is one of the strangest novels I've read recently. Friend asked me could I recommend him this book and what is all about and I couldn't reply. First I don't have a clue who'll accept it in the way I did and the answer on the second question is confusing (for myself too) because what is all about indeed? For the first time (as I remember) the theme, the story was irrelevant. And I do realize how that could sound odd when this refers to one book.
I mean when you write the book you are writing about something concrete, no? Well, here I'm not sure in that. Here, the way of telling story was so bewitching, so beautiful that it made the story itself almost irrelevant. Sentences were so ... I don't know ... liquid; I had the feeling that I don't read but drink this book. Lovely! Those metaphors, irony, humor, deliciousness, elegance, etc. everything is justifying the title. The Line of Beauty indeed!

This is second Hollinghurst's novel I've read; first one was The Swimming-Pool Library and I liked this one much more. I don't know maybe I'm little puritan although I never thought about myself in that way :)
Here I'll write little anecdote about those two books. Namely when The Line of Beauty won Booker Prize in magazine "Vreme" (Serbian "Time") on the cultural pages was title "Gay novel won Booker" and I thought "oh that could be something new and interesting" (since I'm absolutely hooked on Booker). At the end of that article was web address from where they took this article. I forgot address but it was site for gay and lesbians and I went to check what they say about this novel. It was a huge surprise; namely almost everyone were saying how The Line of Beauty is incredibly boring novel but The Swimming-Pool Library is exceptional.
Now when I've read both novels I could understand why: in this novel there is no "action" while "Library" is so full of "action" that the pages are becoming sticky. So I'm wondering is this novel "gay novel" at all and what does this mean? Yes, Nick - the main character is gay but hey, I almost didn't notice that!

Of course the novel tells about SOMETHING (after all it has 500 pages) and that something is probably above all, crush of that Jane Austin's England (ridiculous in its survival 'till present time), traditional, noble, prim and stuffy and some very untraditional (or unconventional) things such are homosexuality, drugs and AIDS which actually can be found everywhere if you scratch that posh surface.

I'm fascinate with that "Elephant in glazier's shop"--syndrome where everyone are noticing the elephant but no one react, simply because that's not noble. Equally here, you may be debauchee and completely immoral but everything will be perfectly fine as long as you don't take wrong fork at the dinner party. Gosh, that would be such a catastrophe! Preserve surface intact is absolute priority!

Also the portraits are magnificent, all of them. They are all members of English aristocracy or those who painted themselves in the colours of English aristocratism (although they usually have too much paint on their faces) and their surrounding (Nick). All of them are pictured so detailed that you could literally see their thoughts and feelings. Therefore I found Nick so close to me. I completely share his affection to art and beauty; his addiction to the people that loves, his hedonism, his humor, his sharp eye and sharp mind. Oh I could easily identify myself with his character (although I'm not gay but hey, love and passion are blind, aren't they?).

At the end I can't resist to put one totally snobbish comment (in the spirit of the novel): Cover art is beautiful and it does in some special way describe the atmosphere of the novel. You may peek inside but you'll see enough only to light your imagination. It reveals all beauty of its surface, such an elegant superficiality (truth, beauty doesn't need cleverness). And especially I like purity of that cover art elegance: namely there is no "Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize" printed notice or sticker. LOL(less)

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03/18/09

Rowena rated it:

bookshelves: man-booker-list, unbelievablereads, worthy-of-re-reads

21-year-old Nick Guest has graduated from Oxford and is moving in with the Feddens, a wealthy family of London society, whose patriarch is a member of parliament. It is 1983 and Nick is venturing shyly into homosexual forays while avidly pursuing and admiring the glamour of high society.

This book is astounding. From Hollinghurst's complicated spill of sentences, the reader is introduced to the glittering, yet sickly superficial world of the London elite. Nick is at the center of it ...more

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03/03/09

Becky rated it:

bookshelves: booker-winners

Read in March, 2009

really, really excellent. beautiful, affecting, hilarious, devastating. winner of the booker prize in 2004, this book (set in the 1980s) is in essence a comedy of manners that tells the story of nick guest, a middle-class gay english twentysomething who moves in with the feddens, the family of one of his friends from oxford. the feddens live a life of money and privilege; the patriarch, gerald, is a member of parliament newly elected along with margaret thatcher. nick is an outsider in this worl...more

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12/13/08

Hthayer rated it:

Read in October, 2008

This won the Booker, but I'll put it this way, I kept coming across the book in my house and picking it up, only to remember I had already read it. Nick (our hero) comes out of the closet, hangs out with rich people in the 1980s, takes too much cocaine, has friends who start getting sick, the end. Yawn.

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02/23/09

Stephanie rated it:

Read in February, 2009

recommends it for: Anyone quite keen on gay lit and Maggie Thatcher

I really wanted to like this book, as I love London, and I usually appreciate a sharply observed social critique. But aside from the plot (if enough happens to be called a plot) being incredibly slow, the characters are tedious, and even the hero, Nick, isn't particularly redeeming. In fact, he's a bit of a prat.

Unfortunately, Mr Hollinghurst seems to dwell on the seedier side of homosexuality (random threesomes, public-toilet encounters, etc.), as evidenced by both this book and The...more

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01/23/09

Jgknobler rated it:

Read in January, 2009

This is a British novel, set in the Thatcher 1980's, about a gay, middle class, recent Oxford graduate who makes friends with the children of a wealthy, powerful, Conservative Party member of parliament, and moves into the family home. The author uses the phrase "sex and scholarship" at some point in the book, and it describes the book well, as there is much about the novels of Henry James and the music of Richard Strauss, as well as many gay sex scenes which made me uncomfortable (Hey...more

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