" […] so they are casting their problems on society! And who is society? There is no such thing: there are individual men and women and there are families". – Margaret Thatcher in 1987.
This past weekend, while trying not to die from pharyngitis, I read Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty, and I am completely obsessed with his prose. I feel an euphoria every time I think over and over again about this story, an elation worthy of the cocaine Nick consumes throughout the four years in which the book takes place. For those who were here three years ago, I felt the exact same way when I finished reading The Swimming-Pool Library, also by Hollinghurst.
But what is the line of beauty? The curves of the muscles on a man’s back and the S-shape of his spine while arching to highlight his buttocks, lines of cocaine over a Henry James book, the penis of a Portuguese waiter, a street corner in Notting Hill.
Hollinghurst expresses the spirit of the 80s, in all its sumptuous decadence amid the rise of an unprecedented consumerist society, in the most peculiar and detached way possible: this young houseguest, watching life laterally, owning nothing and belonging nowhere, right in the middle of a Conservative MP’s family.
Something that catches my attention in both of Hollinghurst’s books is how they sit at intersections: TSPL is at the crossroads between the end of the British Empire and the "last party" before AIDS, while TLOB stands between the peak of Thatcherism and the End of History.
This book is about so many things: about the bad taste of the economic elite who own and consume everything artistic and cultural, yet know nothing and appreciate nothing; about the reification of beauty and the liberalization of sexuality; about the institution of the family in a sociological and Freudian context; about the socio-sexual regulation of spaces; about irony; about aestheticism; about Strauss, Bruckner, Guardi, Gauguin, Henry James, ogee arches, cornices; about the fetishization of 'exotic' bodies, bloody blowjobs full of cocaine; about a bildungsroman whose protagonist does not return to society as an adult citizen...
That phrase by Margaret Thatcher, which I read for the first time in the article 'Attachment and Possession: The Romance of Family, Politics and Things in The Line of Beauty', written by David Alderson, has alarmed me since Sunday. A kind of terror created by the emotions of each stage of my life: detachment, longing, envy, and self-pity. A self-pity that belongs to a greater pity, a surprisingly unconditional love for the world. I think about the world once more, and I carry on. 'It wasn't just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful.'"
