In his Paris Review interview, Hollinghurst recalls: “My old friend the novelist Lawrence Norfolk used to say, ‘You write marvelous descriptions, but why do you have these terrible plots?’ I like evoking atmospheres and analyzing relationships and feelings, but plot I feel faintly embarrassed by.” His novels at times get so tied up in multiple reflections about some past event that they never feel like they’re moving forward at all. In The Swimming-Pool Library, William Beckwith’s picaresque sexual adventures are set up as a foil to the diaries of an old man (William’s friend calls him the “queer peer”), recounting life back when gay men couldn’t be as open about their lives as they are in the novel’s present, the 1980s, and the story loses focus in nests of ironic observations and juxtapositions.
And in both The Sparsholt Affair (2017) and The Stranger’s Child, the central passionate relationships—between two male Oxford students in the first, and between two Cambridge ones in the second—come to their narrative conclusions about 300 or 400 pages before the novels do; and so the rest of each novel traces the convoluted, many-decades-long inability of other people to understand what happened back in the day, or why these already concluded relationships were significant. Often the survivors and family members, such as David Sparsholt’s gay son, Johnny, can’t even comprehend gay life before it was decriminalized; and just as the “scandal” that bears David’s name (an echo of well-known British sex and politics scandals, such as “the Profumo affair” or “the Thorpe affair”) is never mentioned, the truth of the past remains firmly closeted along with him.
A remarkable exception to the plotless, multiperspective ambivalence that infuses his books is The Line of Beauty—perhaps one of the past century’s finest novels. While it covers a stretch of history over the mid-’80s that coincides with Margaret Thatcher’s government, it’s a manageable span. Even better, it is told from one point of view, that of Nick Guest (yet another of Hollinghurst’s twentysomething Oxford graduates), who moves in with the Feddens—a Tory MP, his wife, his daughter, and their son, Toby, a fellow Oxford student on whom Nick has a crush. Offered an attic room in their home, he mixes happily with the Tories who have recently come to power, bringing their glib and self-disparaging humor with them; they shrug off their importance so they don’t seem vulgar, even while secretly harboring vulgar habits of privilege, chauvinism, and sexual hypocrisy. For Nick, wandering through their grand homes is far preferable to visiting the disconnected artifacts in his father’s antique shop back in Northamptonshire. In their wealthy part of London, people live with the precious objects that Nick can only dream of purchasing in small, selfish bursts. Nick’s patron saints (and the patron saints of many a Hollinghurst protagonist) are Oscar Wilde and Henry James, who represent everything that matters most to him: art and making a life alongside the sort of people who live for it.
