“The success of The Line of Beauty meant that Alan Hollinghurst’s
next book was surely going to be eagerly anticipated. But the
seven-year wait for The Stranger’s Child and the steady unfurling
of its ambition over the novel’s 435 pages has had another effect too.
It has dawned on people that Hollinghurst, the gay novelist, might also
be the best straight novelist that Britain has to offer—that is, the
writer whose talents sit most comfortably within the contours of the
form. . . . The Stranger’s Child stands comparison to Jonathan
Franzen’s The Corrections for the way that the sweep of the
narrative, its simultaneous flicker of comedy and drama, is matched and
sustained by the precision and the leisurely economy of its individual
sentences . . . The Stranger’s Child spans almost a century. And
here, too [as in his previous books] sex opens up the novel, though the
thing unlocked is not the small, cloistered world of Edwardian privilege
but of all English literary history. The book’s sections are linked by
two houses that, in their different ways, stand witness to social
decline: Corley Court, a Victorian pile, home of the aristocratic young
poet Cecil Valance; and the more modest Two Acres family home of George
Sawle, his friend, and lover, from Cambridge. With [this] novel
Hollinghurst imaginatively insists that our literary tradition would be
unrecognizably depleted without the submerged current of homosexuality.
And that The Stranger’s Child itself is the culmination of not
only Hollinghurst’s ambition but that secret literary tradition to which
it is addressed. It is a claim that is hard to dispute.”
—Geoff
Dyer, New York Magazine
How about you? Any books you are dying to read?
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2 comments:
This list is dreamy!
The Stranger's Child, definitely. The Line of Beauty was devastatingly good.
I'm going to add Derby Day to my list. I'm very excited to read Joan Didion's new book.
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