Reading Order
The Line of Beauty Reading Order
The Line of Beauty (2004) by Alan Hollinghurst is the Booker Prize-winning novel that is the most important English novel about the Thatcher years and one of the great novels about the 1980s AIDS crisis — the story of Nick Guest, an Oxford English graduate who moves in with his university friend Toby Fedden's prosperous Conservative family and spends the decade of the 1980s as a social observer and participant in a world that is transforming and about to collapse around him. Hollinghurst is the most technically accomplished English novelist of his generation — his prose has a Jamesian precision and richness that is unmatched in contemporary English fiction — and The Line of Beauty is his fullest achievement: the investigation of how beauty (aesthetic, social, personal) functions in a world where Thatcherism is simultaneously transforming the political landscape and AIDS is killing the generation of gay men who thought themselves free. The title comes from William Hogarth's serpentine line of beauty, which becomes a recurring image for the aesthetic sensibility that Nick applies to everything — including the people he loves, with disastrous consequences.
Where to start
The Line of Beauty (2004) — the complete novel. Hollinghurst's recommended reading order: The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) is his debut and the most exhilarating and explicit; The Folding Star (1994) is his second and the most formally intricate; The Line of Beauty is his acknowledged masterpiece; The Stranger's Child (2011) and The Sparsholt Affair (2017) are later novels in the same tradition. All can be read independently
Complete The Line of Beauty Book List
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The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst·2004
The Line of Beauty — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst about?
The Line of Beauty follows Nick Guest across three sections set in 1983, 1986, and 1987 — the decade of Margaret Thatcher's political dominance and the AIDS epidemic's arrival in England. Nick has moved in with the Fedden family (his Oxford friend Toby, his sister Catherine, his MP father Gerald, and his mother Rachel) in their Notting Hill house, and the novel follows his social ascent into the world of Thatcher's England — dinner parties, cocaine, country houses, and the Conservative MP's world — alongside his relationships with two men (Leo, a Black Londoner who works for the council; Wani, a Lebanese-British millionaire's son) and the AIDS epidemic's progressive presence in the background and foreground of his world. The novel ends with Gerald Fedden's exposure in a financial scandal, Nick's expulsion from the Fedden household, and his encounter with Wani, now dying of AIDS. The Line of Beauty is simultaneously a social novel (about class, money, and Thatcher's England), a novel about aesthetics (Nick's Jamesian sensibility and his application of the 'line of beauty' to everything he encounters), and a novel about the AIDS epidemic's particular devastation of gay men who had thought the future was open to them.
Why is The Line of Beauty compared to Henry James?
Hollinghurst's prose is explicitly Jamesian — he has the same precision about consciousness and social perception, the same syntactic elaboration, the same capacity for rendering the texture of a social situation through accumulated detail. Nick Guest is a student of Henry James and sees his world through a Jamesian sensibility; the novel explicitly echoes James's structural approach (the observer who enters a prosperous household and sees its values more clearly than the family can). Hollinghurst has said in interviews that James's late style — The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl — is his primary literary model. The comparison is also thematic: James was fascinated by the relationship between aesthetic sensibility and moral consequences, which is exactly Hollinghurst's subject in The Line of Beauty. Nick's aesthetic mode of perception — his tendency to see people as beautiful objects rather than as moral subjects — is both his most distinctive quality and his fundamental limitation.
How does The Line of Beauty depict the AIDS crisis?
The Line of Beauty depicts the AIDS epidemic obliquely at first and then with increasing directness as the novel moves from 1983 to 1987. In the early sections, AIDS is a presence in the background of Nick's social world — mentioned, feared, but still at the margin of his experience. By 1987, it has killed people Nick knows (and the novel's final image involves Wani, now visibly ill). Hollinghurst's approach is to show the AIDS crisis as it was actually experienced by gay men in England in the 1980s — gradually, through peripheral deaths that become less peripheral, against the background of a political culture (Thatcher's Conservatives) that was actively hostile to the gay community. The novel does not make AIDS its central subject but shows it as the historical condition within which all the novel's other concerns (beauty, class, sex, Thatcherism) must be understood.
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