Alan Hollinghurst C/D S&D

Anyone read the new one yet? As a fan of his best work I've swithering about it but it's long, I was underwhelmed by The Stranger's Child and reviews have been patchy (inc one or two likening it to TSC, not a good thing).

Not impressed -- an etiolated thing.

Shame. Before TSC was published he was just about my favourite current novelist. Massive anticipation for the next one. Would hardly have believed I could get from there to probably not bothering to read his next but one.

I'm in the same position.

Just finished *The Line of Beauty*. Hollinghurst has said he couldn't/wouldn't write an explicitly political novel but I was still surprised by the lack of outright rage about Aids. Not that I wanted it to be didactic but you could come away from the text with no real sense of just how fucking toxic and vile the situation was in the UK in the 80s.

I keep thinking about the ending. The expulsion was brutal but it made sense. You can see how the situation with Guest arose and how his staying was situational and largely unexamined: it was only in light of the 'scandal' that the family needed to retroactively make sense of it, and needed to save face; how his presence - even as a kind of unpaid carer for Catherine - by necessity for them, became parasitic, almost vampiric.

Can't decide what to make of the literal last few lines. Does he finally see through the 'lines of beauty' to the mundane, but equally beautiful, reality beneath?

I love the last couple of pages, not least because of their implication of the future in which we will one day look back at that time. I think his perception of the 'beautiful' in the last line is sincere; unsure if that implies 'seeing through' other things.

Nick wasn’t a boring monster imo he was a hypocrite and a parasite, just as Gerald accused him— the AIDS test was (I felt) deliberately placed there as a maguffin, that the prospect of losing his life to AIDS was less painful that his social expulsion.

goon otm

Imagine being called a hypocrite and a parasite by that oleaginous cretin and him being *right*.

And that closing passage: it's probably more a kind of hyper-sensitivity brought on by the trauma of his betrayal but something about that 'there was a street corner at all' - like the aesthete was finally, however briefly, forced to see to the heart of things, literally and metaphorically.

Gerald, ftr, not fgti.