Volume 52, Number 1 · January 13, 2005
The Comedy of Being English
By Colm Tóibín
The Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
Bloomsbury, 438 pp., $24.95
In his second novel, The Folding Star, Alan Hollinghurst guides his narrator, Edward Manners, into the home of an old school friend who is married with young children. Manners is horrified by this blatant display of heterosexuality. 'Why did they do it?' he asks. He goes on: 'It must be instinct, nothing rational could explain it...I was at the age when I couldn't ignore it; my straight friends married and bred, sometimes remarried and bred again, or just bred regardless.' Manners, like all of Hollinghurst's heroes, is not in the breeding business. For him 'the world of heterosexual feeling,' as he puts it, is 'never fully plausible.' Later in the novel, he refers to 'the semi-sedation of hetero expectations.'
Review, 4264 words
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