Not another throw-away bestseller, 'The Line of Beauty' has the depth and qualities of a true classic. While it does have several explicit sexual scenes, the writing is focused on artistic and literary themes, psychology and character development, along with a great deal of Wildean irony and decadence.
Since I have not yet read the novels of Henry James, I failed to understand the many Jamesian allusions. But I did quite enjoy the Jabberwock allusion about the Prime Minister: "'She's put this country on its feet!...[said Lady Partridge, the grandmother] She showed them in the Falklands, didn't she?' 'You mean she's a hideous old battleaxe,' muttered Catherine. 'She's certainly a manxome foe,' said Gerald. Sir Maurice looked blank. 'One wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of her.'" If one hasn't caught this allusion, illumination is available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwo...
As I finished reading the concluding scene with its daydream of mortality, I suddenly saw Nick's narrative in its entire book length as a virtual classic Greek tragic drama. ( )

Frustrated by his first brush with romance, Nick Guest feels he’s been “swept to the brink of some new promise,” and the moment is profoundly poignant. Though “The Line of Beauty” runs through a period scarcely more than thirty years in the past, time already seems to have rendered Margaret Thatcher’s England as misty and distant as something out of “Brideshead Revisited.” Could the world really have changed this much so quickly? That misty quality is deceptive. In this penetrating and mature work, Alan Hollinghurst employs a hard, sharp wit to delineate the sort of moral bankruptcy that attended the early days of the HIV pandemic. As in Hollinghurst’s “The Swimming Pool Library,” the contrast between the rather savage tale and his complex and contemplative style proves riveting.

At Oxford, the youthful main character obsesses over a friend from a wealthy background. Visiting their home, Nick finds himself seduced by the pleasures of wealth and yearns to “steep himself in the difficult romance of the family.” Someone should have warned him to be careful what he wished for. He becomes a chronic houseguest, and his initiation into the world of erotic love (for which he’s “achingly ready and completely unprepared”) is concomitant with his passage into a realm of privilege and prejudice. As in all his work, the author adroitly steers the tone through personal drama to scathing social satire. Along the way, he veers into a veritable tour of British literary icons from Austin to Waugh – with an especially satisfying journey through the heart of Henry James territory – without ever diminishing the impact of his own remarkable voice. ( )

The main character of this book is Nick Guest, a middle-class Oxford scholar hanging about the world of a very well-to-do, conservative political family in mid-eighties London, an aesthete obsessed with the idea of beauty, an admirer of beautiful boys and art and architecture and the writing of Henry James. The prose of the book itself is so beautiful that I stopped forty pages in and reread them just to savor the elegance of the language. It's the kind of book that makes me feel compelled to commit passages to memory. As a story, I found The Line of Beauty thought-provoking and filled with rich detail. It is enjoyable on so many levels, from the political to the personal, satirical to tragic. The characters are memorable and linger in my mind in all their flawed and endearing complexity. I enjoyed this book immensely! ( )

In The Line of Beauty, Nick Guest is a young, coke-snorting gay man from modest means, who, in early 1983, is invited to stay with the wealthy and well-bred Fedden family. Gerald Fedden is a Tory MP, an empty man who has mastered the art of superficial charm that comes with his station. Nick, already an outsider by his gay status in this Thatcherite era, falls in love with the Fedden family and their lifestyle, eventually choosing a lover who can supply him with the finer things in life. Nick is our travel guide through this world of detached privilege, while the realities of the outer world, including AIDS, threatens to disrupt it all. Alan Hollinghurst's impeccable prose and perfect rendering of this era in recent London history has won The Line of Beauty wide acclaim.

Pure pleasure and very reminiscent of Mrs. Dalloway: the townhouse in the heart of power, the magnificent bourgeois matron, the contrast between her and people who are in one way or another falling apart, the conclusion of everyday joy as the justification for living.