Recommendations
Books Like The Line of Beauty
Best books to read after The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Hollinghurst's 2004 Booker Prize-winning novel — Nick Guest's decade with a Conservative MP's family across the 1980s world of Thatcherism and AIDS — is the most accomplished English novel about that decade and a Jamesian study of aesthetics, class, and the cost of beauty as a way of perceiving the world. These recommendations extend the experience through Hollinghurst's other novels, through fiction that investigates the 1980s with comparable honesty, and through the English literary tradition that Hollinghurst places himself in.
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The Swimming-Pool Library
by Alan Hollinghurst
Hollinghurst's 1988 debut — William Beckwith, a wealthy young gay man in the summer before AIDS will transform everything, and his unexpected relationship with an elderly lord who holds the key to his grandfather's secrets. The Swimming-Pool Library is the most exhilarating of Hollinghurst's novels — it captures a specific historical moment (gay life in London just before AIDS) with the same social and erotic precision that The Line of Beauty brings to the Thatcher years.
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The Stranger's Child
by Alan Hollinghurst
Hollinghurst's 2011 companion — a poet's visit to a country house in 1913 and its consequences across five narrative sections spanning a century. The Stranger's Child investigates how the past is remembered, mythologized, and lost — themes that The Line of Beauty touches through Nick's encounter with the Victorian aesthetic tradition (the Hogarth line of beauty) — and shares The Line of Beauty's Jamesian prose and its concern with the relationship between beauty, class, and what gets preserved or destroyed by time.
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Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh's 1945 companion in the English tradition of the novel about a middle-class outsider who attaches himself to an aristocratic family and is shaped — and eventually expelled — by his encounter with their world. Both The Line of Beauty and Brideshead Revisited are organized around the same situation (a young man of limited means, exceptional sensibility, and strong aesthetic feeling moves in with a prominent family) and the same question (what does the outsider's love of beauty cost him when the beautiful world he has entered is also morally compromised?).
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Howards End
by E.M. Forster
Forster's 1910 'Only connect!' — the explicit literary ancestor that Hollinghurst places himself in relation to: where Forster's novel asks whether the cultured (Schlegels) and the practical (Wilcoxes) can connect, Hollinghurst's asks whether the aesthetic (Nick) and the political (Feddens) can. Both novels investigate the relationship between culture, class, and power in England — and both end with the outsider expelled from the world he tried to inhabit.
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White Noise
by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's 1985 companion in the international literary tradition of the 1980s novel that investigates consumer capitalism, media saturation, and the substitution of image for substance. Where The Line of Beauty shows Thatcher's England through the aesthetic sensibility of one gay outsider, White Noise shows Reagan's America through the academic absurdism of a professor of Hitler Studies. Both are about societies in the process of losing touch with reality — and both use formal precision to capture what the social world's surfaces conceal.
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The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
Tartt's 1992 companion in the tradition of the campus novel about the danger of aesthetic sensibility unchecked by ethical constraint — Richard Papen's encounter with a group of Greek students at a Vermont college who have murdered one of their number. The Secret History and The Line of Beauty are both structured around a young man from modest origins who is seduced by beauty and privilege, and both investigate what happens when aesthetic experience becomes a way of evading moral responsibility.
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The Golden Bowl
by Henry James
James's 1904 final novel — the most direct Jamesian precursor to what Hollinghurst does in The Line of Beauty: Maggie Verver's gradual understanding of the secret between her husband Prince Amerigo and her best friend Charlotte Stant. The Golden Bowl and The Line of Beauty share the same Jamesian world (wealth, social performance, the management of knowledge and ignorance) and the same formal commitment to rendering consciousness through prose of exceptional precision. Hollinghurst is the most important contemporary inheritor of James's style.
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Maurice
by E.M. Forster
Forster's 1914 (published 1971) companion — Maurice Hall's journey toward accepting his homosexuality and eventually finding love with a gamekeeper. Maurice and The Line of Beauty are companion English novels about gay desire and its social costs across different historical periods: Forster's pre-war England where homosexuality is illegal, Hollinghurst's Thatcher England where it is legal but AIDS is killing the generation that thought itself free. Forster gives the happy ending; Hollinghurst shows what history actually delivered.
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