Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I don't love swimming enough to find a pool in NYC to swim regularly, but I do love swimming. The outdoor pool at Grove Hotel is small and cold. It is also too shallow at one end. Nevertheless, I swam happily for 40 minutes yesterday afternoon. This morning, turning round for another short lap, I remembered that my father taught me to swim, in the public swimming pool next to the Bukit Merah Bus Interchange. That pool, like so many things in Singapore, is gone. Behind locked gates, the empty pools stand like huge scummy cisterns. My father is not a great swimmer, but he knows the basics. School swimming lessons finished my swimming education. When I am swimming, I often imagine myself floating like a fetus in my mother. Since I am thrashing vigorously, and not floating, swimming combines the joy of independent action and the security of a womb.  Before my swim yesterday, TCH and I walked along the beach to the Pines. I love beach walks too, and this one by the Atlantic was especial...

identification / identification I think I will identify myself as a guest. An alien is so outlandish. I am your guest. In the house you describe as a beautiful book about damn ugly people, I live as Nick Guest. I ache for class and mourn for Robbie in Atonement . To Howard’s End I come as Leonard, pity’s guest. There are house rules for a vacation orgasm. The mind closes the doors softly like a good guest. My friend is buying his first house in New Hope. He has invited me to be his weekend guest. The good hosts in The Odyssey throw a great feast while stories are a grateful answer from the guest. Sometimes Jee is Odysseus, sometimes Penelope. Homer, if not a home, makes me a host and guest.

This is how I know I have read a masterpiece: I walked out of my apartment, and my neighborhood seemed far less real than the world of Robbie Turner, Cecilia Tallis and Brioni Tallis. I loved them, and feared for them more fiercely than I had for anyone real. The love and fear came from an imagination so thoroughly awakened that its previous life had the quality of a dream. I think Alan Hollinghurst is a greater prose stylist than McEwan. The Line of Beauty has passages of such lyrical, yes, beauty, exquisite passages that Atonement could not match. McEwan sometimes resorts to commonplaces. Sunlight is described as a "parallelogram," a "wedge," and then "geometry." But McEwan is not after beauty per se; his prose probes and delineates the subtle psychology of his characters. Many reviewers compare him rightly to Jane Austen for his strength in this regard, though McEwan is, I think, fundamentally non-ironic. Who said that there are only three literary mo...

Alan Hollinghurst's prose in this novel is as sensuous and sensitive as his later Man Booker Prize-winner. His style was an accomplished fact before writing "The Line of Beauty." Quiveringly and ironically, it traces the outlines of unrequited love and loss in the highly sexed-up world of homosexuals. What the earlier novel lacks is the political dimension of that world, the Thatcherite atmosphere and events so brilliantly captured in "The Line of Beauty." Though it depicts non-white and non-bourgeois characters, the earlier novel also lacks the texture, the tangled web, of class and race. What "The Folded Star" offers is an imagined Belgium, dreamed up by Edward Manners, the Englishman who falls in love with a boy he tutors. England, depicted in the middle of the three sections, is viewed in Edward's memory of his past romances, again giving the external world the feel of a dream, lost and irrecoverable, whether symoblized by the fatal motor accid...

I finally got round to reading "The Line of Beauty" after buying it from "Bon Voyage" in Provincetown. I had sensed that I would enjoy reading the novel, and putting it off was a way of enjoying the luxury of anticipation. It is a beautiful novel, saturated by desire--sex, power, class, wealth--intimacies thwarted one way or another except for the intimacy of individual aesthetic appreciation, in reading or appreciating fine furniture or architecture. The protagonist's self-willed illusion is that the appreciation of beauty can bring one closer to lovers, politicians, patricians and millionaires. Here is the protagonist, in bed with his male Arab British lover, explaining the novel's title: He slept there from time to time, in the fantasy of the canopied bed, with its countless pillows. The ogee curve was repeated in the mirrors and pelmets and in the wardrobes, which looked like Gothic confessionals; but its grandest statement was in the canopy of the bed, ...