For a brief but powerful moment in mid-October, Alan Hollinghurst was famous. He had written the first gay novel in 36 years to win the Booker Prize, the top British award for fiction by a citizen of the Commonwealth or Republic of Ireland. Then, two weeks later, state initiatives banning gay marriage helped carry President George W. Bush to a second term and talk of a gay Booker winner seemed to, well, just go away.
It's appropriate, then, that the novel which won Hollinghurst this honor, The Line of Beauty, satirizes the reign of that English forbearer to the Bush administration: Margaret Thatcher.
Set between the British elections of 1983 and 1987, The Line of Beauty concerns Nick Guest, a 21-year-old Oxford graduate who accepts an invitation to move into the posh Notting Hill mansion of his former classmate, Toby Fedden. In addition to being Nick's fantasy love interest, Toby is also the son of a Conservative Party member of Parliament. This living arrangement is made rather awkward when Nick starts to come into his own as a young gay man in London.
There is a lot of sex in this novel. Did you intend to comment on the excesses of the time?
I've always written quite a lot about sex, but I do so less in this book than in my first. There's that big initiatory sex scene, when Nick has this overwhelming feeling of breaking through into a whole new area, but after that there's not really any sex. In the second section, we see a rather changed Nick, there's something a bit funny about it. It's not this openhearted Nick; he's getting involved in threesomes and stuff. None of it is very joyous, though. Everything is reduced to money and things. In the third section, AIDS arrives, but that shouldn't be seen as a moral judgment on the character's behavior.
Will Self made AIDS a form of punishment for his characters' moral turpitude in Dorian, but it winds up feeling almost vulgar.
It is a very difficult thing to bring off, that. The thing is, though, so many people at the time actually viewed it as a form of punishment. I avoided writing about AIDS, not knowing how to do it in ways that would interest me. But as a gay writer I was having the subject thrust on me.
Does writing about sex pose any extraordinary difficulties in terms of craft?
If you want to do it seriously, as I always have—I always try to write about sex as carefully as everything else—to make it what it is, a worthy fictional subject, then you have to do it carefully. There are questions of taste, I suppose; you don't want anything you write to be mechanical or seem like pornography. There are traps to watch out for. I don't know if I've done it successfully. The key is not to be evasive.
Tom Wolfe recently made the claim that all sex is socially determined. Do you agree?
I would, very much. In my novel, Nick falls in love with this upper-middle-class English boy he can't have, this unimaginatively straight guy. At the same time, something propels him to have erotic adventures with youth of other classes and other races. It's certainly a truism of homosexuality that it has enabled people to cross barriers of class and race. It's something I'm very interested in: how class and race and sex interact in England.
What is it like to be living in America at this moment in time? Does it feel at all like Thatcherism all over again?
Isn't it just? It's amazing, the closing down of industry, the cutting back of welfare ...
Still, you haven't had the social backlash that's happening here, with the push to legislate a ban on gay marriage.
You have to remember that Britain is perhaps the least religious country in the world. It is mind-boggling to hear how many people here say they are religious. One could really be flayed upon it, and the idea that the election could really turn by having an anti-gay marriage bill on the ballot in these states. The whole ethos is completely foreign to us.
In your American travels, have you encountered any adverse reactions to your book?
It's so easy to become paranoid when the government veils itself in secrecy, isn't it? But no, everyone who has come to the readings I've given seems to have attended because they know and like my work. The only problem was that this proved a very hard book to sell in the States. All the American publishers said it was too British, and you couldn't expect Americans to be interested in this period of time. To which I just laughed. Surely one of the pleasures of reading fiction is to find out about things which you don't know.
Nick is writing a thesis on Henry James throughout the book, and critics have remarked upon the beauty of language in The Line of Beauty. Were you inspired by James?
I certainly don't read much new fiction when I'm writing. Especially because I have quite a lot of friends that are writers and I don't want to feel I am in competition. I do belong to a Henry James reading group, where we only read Henry James. Otherwise, I read a lot of Russian 19-century literature. I read War and Peace for the first time and I picked up Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. I wanted to read about people who were involved in and moved by politics.
Did you write this book any differently than your previous works?
In this book, more than ever before, there is the question of what you leave out. I generated a lot of material that I decided in the end I wasn't going to use. Still, I hardly rewrite at all. I write everything in pen and ink in large notebooks. Part of the reason I'm so slow is I try to get it right the first time.