Creatures, sometime in the bad years (the 2000s) I was walking through Logan Circle right before Valentine’s Day when I overheard a young man discussing his plans for the feast: “Oh, just my usual. Cuddling a bottle of wine, putting up pictures of Margaret Thatcher.”
I can only assume that this homosexual was the time-traveling hero (one man’s hero is another man’s…) of Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 novel The Line of Beauty. Nick Guest, what a filching and precarious name he has, Nick Guest starts the novel in 1983, and yes, putting the year in the section heading is a spoiler, Tagged for major character death, living with his Oxford best friend, the son of a Tory MP blown into Parliament on the great blue wave of the Thatcher years. The book opens and closes with two blowout elections for the Conservatives, and although it is a fairly lacerating satire, you just don’t write a whole book about these people without a certain desperate fondness for them. There’s a way of reading this novel where it’s that Twitter crack about the Know Your Enemy podcast, which I’m sure I’m misremembering, that’s like,
kye: look at these intriguing right-wingers, so intellectual, such weird little guys!
the person they’re talking about: the banks are run by Jews
But there’s another level where that disjunction, that intrigue and overestimation, is the deep engine of the novel: we perceive beauty in squalid situations, we gild the most unprepossessing objects. It’s stupid and poignant!
My favorite trick of Hollinghurst is how often and unexpectedly he’ll drop the word “surrender.” Things are always surrendering to other things here—when nobody even asked them to! My second-favorite trick is how rarely he drops the word “lover.” Whenever he calls somebody Nick’s lover it’s to indicate an absence.
The political insight here is not especially deep. In the small but vivacious canon of novels of queer conservative politics, The Line of Beauty is no Ravelstein. The Tories are hypocrites and racists, philistines and snobs. In fact none of these characters seem to have much of an interior life; other than camouflaged and deflecting Nick, they are who they appear to be, with the semi-exceptions of his first crush and his first lover. By the end of the novel I was a little weary of this world where one person has way too much interiority and everybody else has none. The right-wingers here don’t have reasons for what they do, because they don’t have thoughts, they don’t really have pasts, they have self-regard instead of having experiences.
The other thing they do have, and this is the place where the novel’s political setting most directly touches its intense ambivalence about beauty, is a slavish devotion to Margaret Thatcher. She’s mostly referred to here as “the Lady.” She’s the new Gloriana; all the women dress like her, and the men repaint their doors in Tory blue to match her dresses. When she finally does appear in person she’s an elusive figure, neither impressive nor completely pathetic. But what is it that she gives these people? The right to command and swoon at the same time? The certainty that their privileges are conferred on them by a Higher Power, in this case Womanhood incarnate?
The people in this novel use beauty the way they use alcohol and cocaine: to make themselves feel successful, skillful, and alive. Beauty is a thing you can become a connoisseur of; being the aesthete can be your personality and even your job, a fake job and possibly a fake personality also. Beauty gets confused with wealth: Nick’s father is an antique dealer, and his eventual pseudo-job involves a magazine where half the pages are ads for luxury goods. (Is it a “confusion” if the expensive things are, in some way, beautiful? That whole negotiation of whether some things can be both vulgar and beautiful is another of the novel’s unexpected tensions.)
But finding the wrong things beautiful is also the novel’s image of hope, or care or, you know, love. There’s a funny bit where Nick’s frenemy, the troubled daughter of the Tory family, points out that he always falls for ugly guys, and he responds “feebly” that they were “beautiful to me.” “‘Exactly!’ said Catherine. ‘People are lovely because we love them, not the other way around.’” But Nick is not convinced, like, Am I not allowed to find uggos beautiful? Are people not allowed to be beautiful just because I say so?
He has his first tryst beside a compost heap and it’s very Yeats, “Love has pitched his mansion in/The place of excrement,” nicely unsubtle and not what I would expect from a novel so openly modeled on Henry James. Nick finds this near-stranger he met through a personals ad beautiful; his heart sings, it’s so ingenuous and touching, I loved him in spite of myself. And part of what the novel is doing, I think, is gathering together a collection of ways we can find the wrong things beautiful: first love in squalor, the glossy caress of a BMW ad, somebody who can’t say he loves you and maybe can’t love you at all; the Iron Lady. Those experiences of beauty point in different directions, they shape different possible lives and futures. Do those differences mean that some are “really” beautiful and some not? Can you be deceived about what is beautiful, can beauty be a kind of mass hysteria, or is it always an experience of something real and deeper than the object of admiration can ever know?
I don’t know that I loved this book. It felt a little too carefully lapidary, a little too aware of me reading it and being impressed. But it’s doing something strange and subtle, something that did resonate pretty strongly with me: It’s a satire on the aesthetic life, and like all satires, it reifies and glamorizes what it caricatures.
Photo of a Spitting Image puppet of Baroness Thatcher, by mattbuck at the Imperial War Museum and found via Wikimedia Commons; used under a Creative Commons license, etc etc, no poll tax.