Volume 41, Number 18 · November 3, 1994
Love's Old Sweet Song
By Gabriele Annan
The Folding Star
by Alan Hollinghurst
Pantheon, 432 pp., $24.00
Adjectives that would describe Alan Hollinghurst's second novel all seem to begin with an 'e': erotic, eerie, enigmatic, erudite, eclectic, and, above all, elegiac. Explicit, too: pubes and sphincters come into it a lot. Like his first novel, The Swimming Pool Library, The Folding Star is about homosexual love and set, though less exclusively, in homosexual milieux. It captures the built-in pathos of a love that can be unbearably intense even when—or especially because—the lover knows that it won't last even as long as the beauty of the loved one; while the fragility of that beauty is another cause for ache and pity. There are homosexual relationships that endure as long as any heterosexual marriage, but Hollinghurst is not concerned with those. The first-person narrators of both his novels are cruisers and voyeurs, but their voyeur's vision is misted with the sadness of transience foreseen. Lines from the Ode on Melancholy would make a suitable epigraph for The Folding Star, which is all about
Review, 1451 words
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