The Folding Star Book

With this, Alan Hollinghurst becomes my favorite living novelist. For me the phrase means a feeling of excitement about what someone will write in the future, what new domains of experience they'll claim. Martin Amis and Edmund White do not evoke this feeling any longer, though I love them; Updike did, if in his last decade only journalistically. I enjoyed Updike's testimony as a still-acute American elder, his comments on epoch-defining public events'-9/11, the historic election of an African-American president, the return of hard economic times evocative, in speculative origin if not quite in severity and extent, of those that exerted a formative force on his youth and genius.


Though I found The Swimming Pool Library and The Line of Beauty uniquely accomplished, The Folding Star is the first to get me all Trilling-esque: here's the novel as the "bright book of life"; the rightfully dominant genre, the literary register of our times; the dense, dramatic, life-like union-place of all moral, sensory, and intellectual attentions. Hollinghurst has said he reveres Nabokov (with Proust and James) as one of his "grand and shadowy" masters, and both showcase the intellectual sensualism of the truly, the tirelessly responsive. Like Nabokov's, Hollinghurst's prose can go anywhere. He can trace the poetic contour of any event, action or situation. His descriptions do justice to a sleepy Flemish museum:

I felt a little out of step among the chaste northern saints and inward-looking Virgins'-there wasn't one of them that welcomed you or held your gaze as the dark-eyed Italian gods and holy men so often did. Absurd, but I wanted a greeting, even across five hundred years. Here everyone looked down or away, in gestures of reproachful purity. The pious, unflattering portraits, too, of capped and wimpled worthies, were proudly abstinent. They drew respectful crowds of Sunday couples in rustling waterproofs (the day had made an uncertain start).

to music played at a funeral:

The organist was wittering on through his formless and infinitely extendable introit, music that had never been written down, mere sour doodlings to fill the time, varied now and then by a yawning change of registration like a false alert.

to fucking:

I'd used up all the lube Cherif had left in the jar, but I saw tears slide from the corners of his eyes, his upper lip curled back in a gesture like anguish or goaded aggression. His hand flickered up against my chest to stay me or slow me. I was mad with love; and only half -aware, as the rhythm of the fuck took hold, of a deaf desire to hurt him, to watch a punishment inflicted and pay him back for what he'd done to me, the expense and humiliations of so many weeks. I saw the pleasure start up inside for him, as if he didn't expect it, his cock grew hard again in two seconds, his mouth slackened, but I made him flinch with steeper little thrusts. I was up on the chair, fucking him like a squaddy doing push-ups, ten, twenty, fifty…I had a dim sense of protest, postponed as if he wasn't quite sure, he was folded in two, powerless, the breath was pushed out of him, there was just the slicked and rubbered pumping of my cock in his arse, his little stoppered farts. His chest, his face, were smeared with sweat, but it was mine: the water poured off me like a boxer, my soaked hair fell forward and stung my eyes.

The narrator, Edward, is a thirtysomething Englishman giving private English lessons in a secretive and sleepy Belgian town. He's another one of Hollinghurst's all-noting aesthetes, excitable, passionate even...but ever-spectatorial, and poetically melancholic; he's transfixed Lolita-ishly, Death in Venice-ishly, by a much younger man. Whereas Nabokov's prose is more obviously bejeweled and striking even when abstracted anthologically, most of Hollinghurst's best passages tie together, with precise images of a dreamlike suggestiveness, ideas that have been slowly accruing to the context. He has a great way of suddenly taking up, in a significant handful, all the themes coursing through the book. Even his gorgeous patches are set-pieces that spread over several pages. A particular high point is a magnificently extended scene in which Edward and another pupil, not the boy he's obsessed with, search a dilapidated country house, a disused sybarite's retreat in which they think the runaway Luc might be squatting.

It was just the time to see the place, not the kind of dawn Luc's grandfather had named the house for or would ever have witnessed there, cold skies above drenched wilderness; though there were hints of classic pleasures, a cloud on the lake just big enough to clothe a god in a fresco stooping on a sex-quest. I'd lost Marcel; I wandered down towards the water, reluctantly moved by the relics of all this fake galanterie, my mind vaguely in summer, though a cold gust insisted it was December and made me twitch up Luc's jacket-collar. I turned back and saw the tiny top windows of the tower colour in the early sun, as though lanterns burnt in them.

...the boards had been ripped from the windows, brambles quested in.

Hollinghurst is capable of motions whose replete stateliness put me in mind not only of Nabokov, but, at times, of Browne and of Gibbon.