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The Line Of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst


7.6

based on 22 reviews
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based on 20 votes
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Nick Guest moves in with the wealthy family of a college friend. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family.

Bloomsbury USA, 400 pages
10/05/2004
$24.95

ISBN: 1582345082

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

NOTES:
Winner of the 2004 Booker Prize.

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Boston Globe Don Lee

"The Line of Beauty" is carried throughout by Hollinghurst's exquisite prose and authorial restraint. He withholds moral judgment, not letting his narrative stoop to invective or mere satire.

Christian Science Monitor Ron Charles

Line for line, Hollinghurst's novel about London during the 1980s is the most exquisitely written book I've read in years.

Daily Telegraph Geoff Dyer

Hollinghurst, as James said, is one on whom nothing is lost. He is living proof that the vaulting claims made by the Master on behalf of the novel - "the force and beauty of its process" - still hold good today.

Daily Telegraph David Robson

The book is Jamesian in the best sense; indeed, in some ways, Hollinghurst surpasses his master. His prose is both super-elegant and super-succinct: there is none of the windbaggery of the later James novels

Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese

Hollinghurst has placed his gay protagonist within a larger social context, and the result is his most tender and powerful novel to date, a sprawling and haunting elegy to the 1980s.

Los Angeles Times Benjamin Lytal

Hollinghurst may be Jamesian, but he is more pitched into the world; his novels are classically enveloping experiences. It is only worrisome that "The Line of Beauty," one of the most mentally nurturing reads this year, is so similar to "The Swimming-Pool Library"; one hopes that Hollinghurst, who should be beloved, will take us farther afield in the future. [3 Oct. 2004, R4]

Publishers Weekly

This novel has the air of a classic.

San Francisco Chronicle David Wiegand

Superficial as these characters are, Hollinghurst maintains our interest in them on the page, even if we wouldn't necessarily want to sit down to tea with them. He does it, simply, through exquisite writing, lushly stylized with just the right words, over and over again.

The New Republic James Wood

The Line of Beauty is an ample and sophisticated delight, charged with hundreds of delicate impressions and insights, and scores of vital and lovely sentences. It is at once domestic and political, psychological and historical. It is funny, moving, and finally despairing.

The Spectator Sebastian Smee

It is almost unbelievably well-written -- 600 pages of finely wrought but tough, close-in observation. [17 April 2004, p. 38]

Village Voice Benjamin Strong

It's a beautiful book about ugly people.

Washington Post Michael Dirda

If you value style, wit and social satire in your reading, don't miss this elegant and passionate novel.

New York Review Of Books Colm Toibin

Paragraph by paragraph, his novel is written with such care, such sweet attention to detail, nuance, rhythm, and the pure comedy of things, that his efforts to make it all tie up in action hardly matter.

The New York Times Book Review Anthony Quinn

To say that [Hollinghurst's] latest novel, the Booker Prize-winning ''Line of Beauty,'' is also his finest should give some idea of its accomplishment, not just in the breadth of its ambition but in its felicities of observation and expression.

The New Yorker

If Nick's aesthetic detachment occasionally seems to reduce the novel's emotional stakes, it nonetheless fuels Hollinghurst's sumptuous writing and his bravura evocation of an entire era.

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Burt Archer

If you are even the slightest bit of an anglophile, with just a hint of snootiness about you, the sort who likes to gaze at topiaries and can find the same pleasure in certain kinds of sentences and sentiments that some Tibetan monks do in mandalas, you may just have found your ideal 21st-century book. [9 Oct. 2004, D14]

The New York Times Michiko Kakutani

In [the] final pages, as shadows of illness, loss and scandal begin to fall over the characters' lives, "The Line of Beauty" becomes more than a well-observed portrait of a decade; it becomes an affecting work of art.

New York Observer Tom Shone

It's hard to pin down the tone here: a kind of bitchy rapture, half in love with the political kitsch of the Thatcher years. As a record of such, The Line of Beauty is unlikely to be surpassed--whether as exhibit or expose is for the reader to decide.

Booklist Michael Spinella

The material and social excesses of the 1980s are deftly portrayed in Hollinghurst's latest success. [15 oct. 2004, p. 389]

London Review Of Books Thomas Jones

Fabulously baroque prose.

Kirkus Reviews

A beautifully realized portrait of a decade and a social class, but without a well-developed emotional core.

The Economist

With its tender evocation of a subtle, rarely illuminated world, its rich characterisation and its simple prose, "The Swimming Pool Library" broke down the walls that had kept gay writing for so long in a ghetto. "The Line of Beauty", by contrast, is fine when it deals with gay life. But that is all. [17 April 2004, p. 82]

The average user rating for this book is 7.6 (out of 10) based on 20 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Rosie R gave it a9:
Fluent and captivating, The Line of Beauty proves that the novel form is alive and kicking and still relevant today. Hollinghurst's elegant prose carries the reader deep into the political and sexual machinations of the eighties. One of the best novels in English to come out of the last decade.

Jay B gave it a10:
I read this the first time and was dissapointed by its languid feel after the intense, obsessive brilliance of The Folding Star. It took 2 more re-reads to realise that I was missing the subtleties of what is actually a work of rare genius.

Amanda gave it a5:
Well written (but little else going for it).

JoAnn D gave it a10:
Brilliant, absorbing, witty and completely engaging! Definitely a favorite. Have enjoyed discussing it with several of my peers at our bookstore. A true pleasure. It is both elegant and stimulating and so much more!

Simon D gave it a1:
So terrible I gave it up -- with great delight -- after 150 pages. Unconving about Oxbridge but even less conving characterisations. The narrator comes across as a cipher and it is not clear why anyone likes him, And over-written too. Several of my friends read this book as well and had the same opinion.

Hakan A gave it a6:
First of all. This is a wonderfully written book. I had great expectations before I started ... and was sadly dissapointed. It's a Hello mazagine turned into art. Beautiful, witty, satiric about rich, supposedly clever, decadent people who fall from grace but has nothing to say either about art or human condtions.

Donna H gave it a5:
Not bad, but I expected more from a Booker winner. Lovely prose, captivating descriptions; an inside look (or what passes for an inside look anyway) at the British version of the greed-is-good '80's. But not one of the characters is likeable -- not even the narrator. Why the other characters let him hang around with them, and indeed, freeload off them, is quite inexplicable, except that if they didn't, there wouldn't be a novel. To sum it up, the book just takes itself way too seriously.

The Line Of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

The Line Of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst