Alan Hollinghurst

I guess I prefer more conventionally plotted novels. The publisher's blurb on the copy I bought was, I feel, misleading in that it implied far more narrative unity than the novel actually delivers, and whoever wrote that copy did Hollinghurst no favors because it leads the reader into the story with expectations doomed to remain unfulfilled. It should be promoted as a collection of loosely related stories. With "The Stranger's Child," I assumed Hollinghurst was using a form that he felt his story required, but now he has repeated the structure in his follow-up, it seems more like a form he prefers, rather than a form that his material demands. At first it's kind of fun, starting each new section and trying to figure out how the new characters relate to the previous (or if they are the same people), but after a while that begins to feel a little coy.

In part three, the repeated descriptions of Johnny’s har were a little. odd.… (more)

I can see why some readers find the middle section long and somewhat boring. Part II is probably the best section of the novel--reminds me of Elizabeth Bowen and Anthony Powell at their best. Powell is probably the better comparison, with his multi-generational structuring, and in so comparing you can see why readers get frustrated: the book feels as though it should be much longer. The game of trying to guess which characters are the same characters from the preceding part, and how the new characters connect with the older characters, gets a little tiresome. Still, I thought it was an excellent novel. Not, by a long shot, nearly as good as "The Line of Beauty," but I'm certainly glad I read it.… (more)

I don't know how to rate this. Until about fifty pages from the end, I sort of had a cohesive idea of it; it frustrated me somewhat and occasionally bored me, but I felt like I could talk about it: the writing, the sort of intergenerational fetishization of black men, the way that I kind of wish any other character in this were the protagonist...
Now I'm much more aggravated but also much more interested in it. It's beautiful and totally unresolved in the kind of way that reminds me somewhat of My Fair Lady.… (more)

Although the story is different, the structure of this book reminded me a lot of the last Hollinghurst I read, The Stranger's Child. At the core there's the lived experience of one person, but that person remains in the shadows while others live their lives in the centre, and keep coming against the unknowable core but getting their own impressions and reflections of it. There's also the frequently awkward relationship Johathan has with his father David, and how people of certain age seem to be interested in him only because of it.… (more)