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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
This novel has the air of a classic.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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]
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Outstanding
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Village Voice Benjamin Strong
It's a beautiful book about ugly people.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Michael Dirda
If you value style, wit and social satire in your reading, don't miss this elegant and passionate novel.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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]
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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Booklist Michael Spinella
The material and social excesses of the 1980s are deftly portrayed in Hollinghurst's latest success. [15 oct. 2004, p. 389]
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Favorable
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London Review Of Books Thomas Jones
Fabulously baroque prose.
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Mixed
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Kirkus Reviews
A beautifully realized portrait of a decade and a social class, but without a well-developed emotional core.
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Mixed
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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]
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