He lives in Holland Park, swims at the Corinthian Club, a gay gym on Great Russell Street (‘the masterpiece of the architect Frank Orme, whom I once met at my grandfather’s’), and picks up men everywhere. The narrator, William Beckwith, is a young aristocrat of leisure. That the waving line, or line of beauty, varying still more, being composed of two curves contrasted, becomes still more ornamental and pleasing, insomuch that the hand takes a lively movement in making it with pen or pencil.Īlan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), is set during the summer of 1983. That straight and curv’d lines join’d, being a compound line, vary more than curves alone, and so become somewhat more ornamental. That curved lines as they can be varied in their degrees of curvature as well as in their lengths, begin on that account to be ornamental. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly funny, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.It is to be observed, that straight lines vary only in length, and therefore are least ornamental. An affair with a young black clerk gives him his first experience of romance, but it is a later affair with a beautiful millionaire that will change his life drastically and bring into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade.įramed by the two general elections that returned Margaret Thatcher to power, The Line of Beauty unfurls through four extraordinary years of change and tragedy. In an era of endless possibility, he finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession with beauty-a prize as compelling to him as power and riches to his friends. It is the summer of 1983, and twenty-year-old Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions, who becomes both a friend to Nick and his uneasy responsibility.Īs the boom years of the mid-eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world-its grand parties, its surprising alliances, its parade of monsters both comic and menacing.
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