A more-or-less complete account of the books I have read, along with singular articles, essays, or stories I'd like to remember.
Index:
2025: June, July, August, September, October
On the broad Russian inability to address their past imperialism.
a.k.a. "Why You Should Never Make a Company Your Personality"
Perhaps I am uniquely ignorant, but I still cannot tell if people like Vought actually think Trump stands for anything they do, if they only see him as a tool, or if they are so far gone their beliefs are meaningless.
The never-ending race to make the future worse continues unabated!
Got a cheap digital Liberties subscription to read their backlogue.
Delightfully vitriolic take on the vapid nothingness of the NYT's cultural coverage.
A thoughtful piece on music criticism, paired well with Jed Perl's "Impassioned Ferocity" in the same issue.
Does not quite come together, but I respect what it was going for.
The first McEwan I have read. Enjoyable.
Review of Nine Hundred Conclusions by Giovanni Pivo della Mirandola, edited by Brian P. Copenhaver; The Grammar of Angels by Edward Wilson-Lee; and Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer.
Something I likely would have never stumbled upon if it weren't for McNally and Marginalian/Maria Popova. A fascinating snapshot of intellectual thought at a very specific time in a very specific place, composed by someone who I now desperately wish I could have had a nice, long dinner with. Harrison says "Sometimes—not very often—in the reading of a book, an odd thing happens. With the feelings, instincts, tastes, of the writer one is conscious of sudden and close sympathy; for his reasoned convictions, his theories, his dogmas, one has an equally strong antipathy." I would not quite call my reaction to Harrison's theories, as laid out in these essays, antipathy, though a lot of it is so dated as to be hard to take as anything but antiquated. Still, her most fundamental observations on human nature often retain a startling relevancy.
"Crabbed Age and Youth", "Unanimism and Conversion", "Alpha and Omega", and the "Epilogue on the War" stand out as the most exemplary pieces.
It's strange and refreshing to read a piece about China that is neither alarmist nor fawning.
Elkins wants to talk about painting not in the language of art history or criticism—i.e., not as a way of discussing the social, aesthetic, or political aspects of the subjects or painters—but rather purely from the point of view of the paint itself, and its manipulation on the palette and canvas. To do this he draws, in a wonderful, esoteric bit of book-length interdisciplinary thinking, from the world of alchemy. For Elkins, alchemy provides the closest analog to both the corporeal and mental experience of painting: it is a prescientific (not necessarily just in a historical sense, but also in a experiential sense) obsession with substances and their transformations, an active engagement with materials that are at once more varied than modern chemistry would ever allow (a kind of thinking in which linseed and walnut oil can be not just two chemical compounds but two totally distinct elements, fundamental to themselves) and more loosely blended and allegorical.
This book was recommended to me by a painter friend, mainly, I think, because he wanted to increase my ability to discuss painting by giving me some second-hand knowledge on the actual physical act of painting. I would say it worked, and i'm glad to have read it.
Review of The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear by Nan Z. Da.
An overview of Octopus intelligence that focuses on the uniqueness of their experience, an approach I have not seen before and found exceedingly engaging.
Most octopuses live only a year or two, depending on the species. Humans, obviously, live much, much longer. And because length of life and intelligence seem connected in some way, a question naturally arises. What use is intelligence in such a very short life, especially since ... "the machinery of intelligence is expensive, both to build and to run"? This conundrum has led to some questionable conclusions, including "a hypothesis of 'accidental intelligence'," as though octopuses had mistakenly developed "'too much brain' for animals living such brief and asocial lives." But if their intelligence is accidental, then in what sense is human intelligence not accidental? Much as we marvel at the brief lives of these fascinating creatures, octopuses might marvel at the fact that humans have to bear the burden of being intelligent for decades on end.
An impassioned (and convincing) polemic advocating a Luddite position towards AI.
I've never dived in to Fowler, but this article did make me want to dig out my copy of Garner, which I find as pedantically comforting as Harold Ross seemed to find Fowler.
I need to actually sit down and read some Smith some day. I've found all the short pieces of her's I've read wonderful.
A review of What Is Free Speech? by Fara Dabhoiwala. As disillusioned as I am as an American, I admit there is still a certain axiomatic quality to some of the foundational American assertions that I doubt will ever be fully knocked out of me. Because of that, there is still something that feels illicit—dangerous, even—in questioning the First Amendment, that oft-trotted out, never-agreed-upon bulwark of American life. I would be interested in reading Dabhoiwala's book mostly for the sections on the origins of "free speech" as an idea in the 17th and 18th centuries; Dabhoiwala's more modern discussion of the topic seems to me, at least through the eyes of Appiah, more uninteresting and unconvincing.
The centernary of William F. Buckley Jr.'s birth has been marked by a number of articles reflecting on his life and legacy. In their June issue, Commonweal ran a review of Sam Tanenhaus' new biography, "Buckley; The Life and Revolution That Changed America," as well as an article by Tanenhaus himself, covering Buckley's complicated relationship with Papal authority. Now, the NYRB has published two reviews of Tanenhaus' work; while Paul Baumann in Commonweal takes an even-handed approach to Buckley's life, both Lilla and Nwanevu use the book as a jumping-off point to explore Buckley's corrosive influence on modern conservatism, and American right-wing logic and rhetoric more broadly.
The most straight-forward Firbank I have read thus far. (I seem to say that every time I read one of his novels.) Part of this feeling, as I noted last time, is surely an ever-increasing familiarity with his style—and style is all there is, really—but I do think that this book is much more pointed than The Flower Beneath the Foot, Valmouth, and The Artificial Princess. The Catholic church, with all its peculiar peculiarities, provides a much more focused object of satirization than the ineffectual English aristocratic class, and the naturally mysterious, mystery-loving nature of Catholicism meshes well with the ambiguity that saturates all of Firbank's prose. Many of his recurrent themes—sublimated homosexuality, secret-keeping, misunderstanding and cross talk, etc.—slot easily into the broader Catholic ethos, making the playfulness and camp of Cardinal Pirelli feel much more grounded than the genteel geriatricity of a work like Valmouth.
A lovely, lovely book. Few things are more wonderful than reading something and suddenly knowing there is an author's entire bibliography waiting patiently for you. As soon as I finished, I knew I would have to find and read all of Brophy's other books. (And I have a good idea that I will enjoy them all as well.) Brophy's writing finds an ever-so-delicate balance between the striking and the subtle, something well-commented on in Stacey D'Erasmo's commendable foreword to McNally Editions' 2025 reprint. I thought her name sounded familiar, but it was not until some-ways though the book that I realized she wrote the critical study of Firbank which comes up as one of the only serious, scholarly works on his oeuvre. Her writing is definitely Firbankian, particularly in its nonsense stichomythia and willingness to linger in playful, slightly-camp vagueness. What separates Brophy from Firbank, in the best possible way, is her further willingness to push into the emotional cores of her vague, camp characters. Susan and Neal, the kind-of couple who we follow across Europe as they flirt and fall in love with men and women from across the continent, as well as dancing shyly around one another, have all the makings of disaffected Firbank players (except titles, perhaps) and yet Brophy endeavors to interrogate the dissatisfaction that lies at the heart of this camp aloofness.
It truly is a wonderful paragraph. It is lovely to read about White's small edits and changes, and the subtle craft with which the final paragraph is built is delightfully downplayed.
The moon, it turns out, is a great place for men. One-sixth gravity must be a lot of fun, and when Armstrong and Aldrin went into their bouncy little dance, like two happy children, it was a moment not only of triumph but of gaiety. The moon, on the other hand, is a poor place for flags. Ours looked stiff and awkward, trying to float on the breeze that does not blow. (There must be a lesson here somewhere.) It is traditional, of course, for explorers to plant the flag, but it struck us, as we watched with awe and admiration and pride, that our two fellows were universal men, not national men, and should have been equipped accordingly. Like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to none and belongs to all. It still holds the key to madness, still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky. What a pity that in our moment of triumph we did not forswear the familiar Iwo Jima scene and plant instead a device acceptable to all: a limp white handkerchief, perhaps, symbol of the common cold, which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all.
May we all be so lucky as to write something so perfect someday.
As with every other facet of life to which it has been applied, AI Christian programs seem to perversely come for the most inextricably human parts of our existence first. I found the theologically-minded sections of both articles to be the most interesting. Koons, for example, wonders if a prayer written by a chatbot can be "truly coauthored by the Spirit?" The answer seems, quite obviously, to be no. Can a chatbot be part of the "communion of saints?" That's raises perhaps a slightly more difficult question: what is the difference between an AI scouring the internet to generate you a prayer and Thomas Cranmer scanning the Bible and other theological texts to write the Book of Common Prayer? In both cases you are reading words which are not your own, words which come from an aggregation and synthesization of other Christian writers and thinkers. Koons and Hansen both come down, correctly, I think, on the side of Cranmer: the difference is that he had a beating heart and a human mind (and an active spirit, if you believe in such things). I will be very interested to see the stances various denominations take on AI. Koons suggests that, in broadly rejecting AI except for the most menial of tasks, Christianity could distinguish itself in an age when it increasingly seems out-of-step with the actual human experience; its tendency for being "stubbornly slow in the face of a rapidly changing world" could, for once, come to its benefit.
A lovely article about fact-checking at The New Yorker, a role I have the delirious belief I'd be great at.
On the serial misapplication of the "standards of review" by the SCOTUS.
An overall entertaining and readable book.
Kuang plays with fire by being so topical: mentions of Rupi Kaur, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Constance Wu all work very well, but the narrator's comments that she feels "as Kanye put it, harder, better, faster, stronger," and "like the kind of person who [listens] to Kanye" have soured only two years after the work's publication. (Though perhaps Kuang would support the way Kanye's descent may mirror that of her protagonist.) The most awkward, unliterary lines come when a reference needs to be explained, such as when "Athena does something similar to what Christoper Nolan does in the movie Dunkirk: instead of following one particular story, she layers disparate narratives and perspectives together[.]" Later, in a particularly jarring example, a slang term seems to want to be both natural and forced:
I felt grown up, womanly, accomplished. I'd hooked up with a sophomore. A cute sophomore. The enormity of it delighted me. I'd crossed a bridge into adulthood; I'd "hooked up" with someone, as the youths say. And I was fine.
I would not point out such a thing normally, but as the sheer volume of these awkward definitions grows and grows so to do their ability to distract one from of the otherwise serviceable writing.
An early, negative review of The Picture of Dorian Gray. I am interested to find the "uncensored" version which caused so much upset; it appears to have been published somewhat recently.
Much more Gothic than I expected. Wilde's theatrical abilities really shine through; besides the paragraphs of philosophical discussion by the narrator, this could have easily been a closet drama with all the dialogue. I particularly enjoyed Lord Henry, the villain of the story, if there is one—Wilde makes no effort to undercut his charm and wit, and near the beginning he comes close to enthralling the reader (at least me) as tightly as he has enthralled Dorian. To have a figure that seems quite clearly intended to be the author's stand-in in many ways advocating the very lines of thought that lead to the destruction of the protagonist is lovely.
An interesting, if brief and under-critical, account of A24's recent attempts to "sell blockbusters." I wish more words had been dedicated to the thoughts of long-time A24 writers and directors on the studio's latest swing towards big-budget work and AI (and less words to the same indie-darling hagiography which can be read elsewhere).
"Legacy studios such as Sony Pictures have attempted to buy a stake in A24; instead, the company has opted to take Wall Street money, preferring not to be drawn into what one executive called Hollywood’s 'hundred years of doing things a certain way.'" I'd rather not get punched in the stomach, so I'm going to shoot myself in the head instead!
I have always been somewhat skeptical of psychoanalysis. Perhaps it is a remnant from a humanities education in which names like Freud and Lacan were cited with suspicious (and often seemingly unrelated) abundance, or just a weariness for a field whose conclusions have always seemed questionably reached to me. Whatever the reason, it is exactly this skepticism—this resistance—which Phillips claims is at the heart of meaningful psychoanalysis! As it turns out, resistance to the psychoanalytic method is in fact the first, and arguably most important, step in the entire process. Those damn psychoanalysts; don't they always seem able to stay just one step ahead of you?
I actually found Phillips' writing very affecting, and this is the first piece on psychoanalysis which has generated meaningful interest in me.
Firbank's first novel, and by far the most digestible of those I have read so far; it goes down easily, like the "ethereally-tinted sweets" on which his party guests nibble languidly. It has the same charm and humor as the others I have read, but not quite in the same amount; perhaps because it is so much less densely camp. Still an enjoyably time.
Mrie takes a very evenhanded approach to the Syrian Alawites, a group I knew nothing about, and their place in the new Syrian government. Misinformation begets violence begets misinformation ad infinitum.
After reading Hansen's Arabia Felix earlier this month I was interested to know more about Forsskal's botanical collections from the doomed Yemen expedition. While in school I worked in my university's herbarium, and botany (especially field collection/herbaria) have remained a keen amateur interest. This article is a very thorough account of Forsskal's botanical methods: his sources, aims, collecting habits, and the eventual fate of his manuscripts are all covered. Coming from Hansen's account, which went to great pains to emphasize how "forgotten" the materials from the 1761 Danish expedition were, I was surprised to find that Forsskal's manuscripts received a not-insignificant amount of attention over the years. While they certainly were not studied as much as their uniqueness perhaps warranted, there does not seem to be the complete dearth of scholarship between their depositing in Copenhagen and Hansen's book as he would have the reader believe.
Read this after it was mentioned in Colin Vanderburg's review "Crise en Abyme". It is hard to argue with Latour's most basic claims about the rut deconstructivist critique has gotten the social sciences into (and, twenty years after the article's publication, its hard to see this rut as having gotten anything but deeper) but his ultimate solution, which seems to be the abandonment of any kind of critique that attempts to elucidate the structures underlying an object, is equally unpalatable. Ultimately, I felt this article pointed out a very real problem and presented a very inadequate solution.
I did enjoy this passage, which nicely equates the always efficiency-boosting, and also forever obsoleting, progress of technology with the normalizing (and, if you are Latour, equally obsoleting) progress of thought:
Or maybe it is that critique has been miniaturized like computers have. I have always fancied that what took great effort, occupied huge rooms, cost a lot of sweat and money, for people like Nietzsche and Benjamin, can be had for nothing, much like the supercomputers of the 1950s, which used to fill large halls and expend a vast amount of electricity and heat, but now are accessible for a dime and no bigger than a fingernail. As the recent advertisement of a Hollywood film proclaimed, 'Everything is suspect…Everyone is for sale…And nothing is what it seems.'
A documentary novel which draws from the journals, reports, letters, and drawings of the six members of the doomed 1761 Danish expedition to reconstruct their fatal journey into modern-day Yemen. Hansen does an excellent job pacing the story, though the historically fastidious parts of my nature chafed somewhat at his unclear blending of documented (and quoted) fact and novelistic conjecture. The personalities of the three most active members of the expedition, and particularly Carsten Niehbur, all come through quite clearly (perhaps moreso than the actual historical record bears out, based on some additional reading). The McFarlane's translation is serviceable, if a little awkward in spots, and Hansen himself can get a little to caught up in his own rhetorical fancies from time to time, but overall I found this book highly entertaining.
I found Valmouth leagues more comprehensible than The Flower Beneath the Foot. Whether this is because the language is slightly more approachable or my brain has just begun to mold to Firbank's maximalist writing style I do not know; it is probably a mix of both. I also found the actual story of Valmouth much more engaging, even with the highly uncomfortable racial dialect.
Barnhill is interested in elevating Firbank's reputation (such as it is) as a "fluff" writer to that of a serious (if not irrefutably idiosyncratic and irreverent) novelist. To do so she attempts to demonstrate that, beneath all the sexual innuendo and scatological humor, Firbank was really writing about the same big and serious themes as his contemporaries. In the case of The Flower Beneath the Foot, Barnhill contends, this means that the novel is really about the Europe-wide sense of isolation, exile, and loss of identity which followed the first World War. Overall I found her argument quite convincing, though it seems odd to focus so much on the particulars of a literary reputation which seems to barely exist. What more can we ask of scholarship, I suppose.
Some of the most tightly-wound, Baroque prose I have read. I found this novel (really more of a novella) almost impenetrable at first but, as I warmed to Firbank's style—and it really is all mostly style, with very little plot or character development to get in the way—I found myself more and more enthralled.
I read this to see what all the fuss in The Swimming-Pool Library was all about, and I can definitely see Firbank's influence on Hollinghurst and the way he writes about social artifice and class. Firbank's influence seems to far outweigh his reputation and legacy, and I also saw hints of some of my other favorite authors: it was hard not to think of some of Waugh's ridiculous names (such as Lady Circumference and the Beste-Chetwyndes of Decline and Fall) when reading about Lord Limpness and Sir Somebody Something, and the descriptions of Pisuerga high society brought to mind Kinbote's Zembla.
Reread on the acquisition of a Bjørn Wiinblad plate depicting Gwendolen Fairfax; I had not read this play since high school (the only Wilde I have read thus far), and I found it much more enjoyable this time around. I am excited to watch one of the recordings of the play that can be found online, as well as reading more Wilde.
A very short, interesting log (really more of a diary) kept by Thomas Knowles, a young man who paused his studies at Harvard to sail as a greenhorn on a whaling ship out of New Bedford. He is only on the ship for a few months before hopping on another passing ship to go to England (he was in-laws with the captain, so one gets the sense he might have been granted some special favors) and in that time they find almost no sperm whales and kill none. His log is instead notable for its descriptions of the other sailors on the boat and for documenting just how boring something like whaling could be. The setup—an educated young Harvard student striking out into the wilderness only to find it boring, indifferent, and unforgiving—makes the book almost feel like an aquatic analog of Williams' Butcher's Crossing, though Knowles' trip never devolves into an orgy of killing (at least not when he was onboard).
Another small-press Cape find, this time on antiquing. This short book presents a selection of Goyer's columns, all of which originally appeared in the Nauset Weekly Calender from 1972-8. Most columns focus on one type of antique (butter molds, trivets, etc.) and follow roughly the same structure: a basic historical overview is provided, followed by advice on identifying and valuing the various variations of said antique which may be found in the wild. While I can see how these short columns could have been engaging when read weekly, interspersed in a larger, more varied paper, when collected in aggregate they become quite repetitious and boring. The most interesting columns are those on fans, weather vanes, stereoscopes, bells, and gravestone epitaphs. There are also several columns reminiscing on the past more broadly, covering topics like Puritan society and Goyer's own childhood.
Goyer is, above all else, cloyingly nostalgic and patriotic. This passage, which ends a column on vice and punishment in Purtian New England, stuck out to me for being so on the nose as to seem intentionally sarcastic, though I highly doubt this was her intention (it would make a great epigraph!):
"It is said that when Rebecca Nurse, an aged woman of Danvers, Massachusetts was sentenced to be hanged for witchcraft (and she was hanged about 1678), that the judges were all drunk. They all repented afterwards, but it was too late. Despite all this, we must believe the Puritans had integrity, sincerity, and simplicity. Most them that is. How else could we have built such a nation?"
This is one of the innumerable small books of local interest published by an independent publisher (in this case the Dennis Historical Society) on Cape Cod. If my experiences trawling through the used book stores of the peninsula are anything to go by, the Cape had a booming small press industry in the 20th century, with special editorial emphasis placed upon local history and folklore. This book presents the lives of eight Dennis-born sea captains, all of whom were sons of the 19th century and worked mostly in trade. The life of Captain Joseph Baxter of West Dennis (1834–1916), the first chapter of the book, is both the longest (21 pp) and by far the most interesting. The narrative presented purports to be the direct words of Baxter, as recorded by his daughter Hattie as he lay on his deathbed. One gets the sense that Baxter was a natural story-teller, and perhaps also a natural embellisher; over the course of his time at sea he claims to have helped run extra-legal courts and executions in goldrush-era San Francisco, been offered the Princess of a Micronesian island's hand (as well as the crown), and been mistaken for John Wilkes Booth during the assassination manhunt.
The stories of the other captains, while never reaching quite the same level as that of Cap. Baxter, all have at least some nugget of either historical interest or oddity. Take this laconic anecdote from the life of one Captain Peleg Thacher of South Dennis (1861–1934), who unfortunately is missing a complimentary Captain Bildad:
"Once when the captain was returning to Boston on the S.S. Indian, when the ship was off Chatham, he looked over toward his home shores and saw a red glare in the sky. He remarked that it might be his home burning. And it was. He knew when he arrived in port."
The great debate on the death of the white male millennial author continues unabated; and it is all I can do to humbly try to keep up, reading back-linked articles, interviews, and, God help me, substack posts. Most of these pieces are, of course, intellectually dishonest at best and propagandizing at worst. Somewhere deep in the horrible depths of cultural combat someone linked this piece by Kriss, published a few months before Jacob Savage's Compact piece. I was pleased to find in it a succinctly articulated expression of the root of my general uninterest in "alt lit" (and a lot of mainstream literary fiction as well, but at least it doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is.):
"A writer can’t not respond to the present, because it’s the only thing that’s actually here. A writer can’t be anyone other than themselves. But an obsession with raw surging nowness or authentic personal experience can often just feel like an excuse for incuriosity. If mainstream literature shows it’s possible to be deeply incurious while maintaining a superficial commitment to diversity, alt lit shows that a superficial commitment to being countercultural and different doesn’t guarantee much either. There is probably no shortcut to a better literature, but a start might be writing that tries more ambitiously to escape its own confines, expanding into the large and sensuous world we actually inhabit, in all its contradictory and ironic dimensions. This writing would take a genuine interest in other people, other eras and other ways of being."
Found this buried on a shelf while moving and decided to read it before sending it off to my friend Ken. A very charming little book, with a rather meandering history of European calligraphy followed by some examples of historical and contemporary (to 1951) handwriting. The handwriting examples are by-far the most interesting part of the book, though the historical section does mention some early works on calligraphy that seem worth exploring more.
It is hard for me not to compare this book to The Line of Beauty; there are obvious external parallels one can draw between both books—architecture, classical music, the interweaving of another author's work through the text (though Firbank comes to play a much larger role in the story than James ever did)—to the point that The Swimming-Pool Library felt, at times, like a first iteration of what would become The Line of Beauty. Both books are concerned with the artifice of both class and gay life in 1980s Britain, and both linger uncomfortably in the shallowness, bordering on callousness, of their main characters. Both examine race through the coupling of the upper class, white protagonist with a working class, black lover (couplings whose sexual dynamics also hold true across both books—perhaps the largest difference between Arthur and Leo is the language used to describe them, and indeed the racial language throughout the entirety of The Swimming-Pool Library feels shockingly dated in a particularly English way. Of course, much of this language is deliberate mirroring of that found in Charles' diaries while in Colonial Sudan; still, I think there is a fascinating evolution to be seen in English society when comparing both books racial language).
[Note: Having read Valmouth I can now see that some of the racial language is also drawn from Firbank's novel.]
Yet, for all their superficial similarities, the underlying structures of both books are so strikingly inverted as to make The Swimming-Pool Library feel the mirror image of The Line of Beauty. The main characters of each book, William Beckwith of The Swimming-Pool Library and Nick Guest of The Line of Beauty, are fundamentally similar men who are developed in almost the exact opposite way. William initially seems like an entirely shallow, vapid man, only interested in sex and stimulation. He is extremely sexually obsessed, not to mention experienced, and it is only over the course of the book that we come to see his intense longing for deeper connection, a longing that cannot overcome his callous attitude towards his partners. Nick Nick, when we first meet him, is a shy, yearning virgin on the cusp of his first sexual encounter, a young man who seems both intensely interior and aesthetically/emotionally engaged with the world; it is only as the novel progresses that we realize this interiority was only the gilding of innocence, quickly rubbed off by experience to reveal the same callous interior William sports from the beginning. Both books build to a disastrous revelation; Nick is his narrative's holder of secrets, hiding his affairs and sexual escapades throughout almost the entire book, while William is the one from whom information is withheld, with the truth of his family's bigoted past only being revealed to him (and the reader) in the final pages. While I found both character's arcs engaging, I thought the approach taken in The Line of Beauty, in which the Nick's shallowness is slowly, brutally revealed, was much more emotionally effective.
The Swimming-Pool Library very much eschews conventional plot structure: while there are several smaller subplots, none really serve to raise the narrative tension towards the grand finale; instead, the book spends most of its time simply dwelling in William's world, letting the reader meander while silently throwing more and more weight behind the shocking final reveal. It is as if a great battering ram is slowly and unknowingly being raised with each chapter, adding more force to the eventual assault. This unusual narrative structure, or lack thereof, serves wonderfully to force the reader into William's shoes. I have read few books in which the central secret was so secret; it is truly as unknown to the reader as it is to William. There is something wonderful in how closely the reader is to William in the last pages of the novel, manically reevaluating every interaction over the course of the story to figure out who knew what and how they might have been subtly broadcasting their knowledge.
The Line of Beauty takes a much more conventional approach, with the reader both aware of Nick's secrets and awaiting their eventual, inevitable airing. This more traditional structure means the novel can much more effectively create a sense of rising tension, which definitely helps to keep the reader engaged (The Swimming-Pool Library does drag in some places), but I can't say that I liked it better, as the experience of reading The Swimming-Pool Library was so unique.
Both books aim to explore the place of gay men in '80s British society by contrasting their main character's experiences with those of a different time period. The Line of Beauty is a book concerned almost solely with the future, both known and imagined. The members of the wealthy, conservative Fedden family, and the broader swath of entrenched British wealth they represent, are almost fanatically obsessed with the monetary, cultural, and social gains they think Margaret Thatcher will provide for them. Much of these characters' time is spent hungrily eyeing their future conquests: Gerald shows little interest towards his actual elected duties and can only look forward towards the ever-greater government positions he sees himself occupying; Nick can only look to his next sexual partner or vanity project. The spectre of the looming AIDS crisis, which haunts the first two sections of the book but does not become an articulated threat until the third, plays on the hindsight which this novel's 2004 publication date gives both Hollinghurst and the reader, a luxury unavailable to The Swimming-Pool Library, published in 1988. The knowledge of this forthcoming devastation forces the reader to always be thinking ahead in a sick parallel to the optimistic wondering of the Feddens: when will people start getting sick? Who will get sick? Who will die?
By contrast, The Swimming-Pool Library is concerned exclusively with the past. This is established from the very beginning of the novel when William explains that, owing to the exorbitant sum his grandfather has given him, he has almost no interest in planning (or even thinking) about his future, besides whatever man/boy he is currently trying to sleep with. The novel instead becomes an exploration of the gay past, as he reads Lord Nantwich's diary and interprets it through the lens of his own gay present. These comparisons are made corporeal as the threats faced by those in the diary are mirrored in the experiences of William and those around him: William is gay bashed by members of the National Front just as Nantwich's former servant/companion (of undetermined orientation) was beaten to death in a racially motivated attack, and William's best friend is arrested for soliciting gay sex, just as Lord Nantwich once was.
The fact that The Swimming-Pool Library does not touch on the AIDs crisis at all only adds to its historicity, as well as its historical focus, as Hollinghurst himself comments on in the afterword found in the 2022 Picador edition of The Line of Beauty:
My first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, came out in 1988, and was set in 1983—a five-year gap that covered the time of its composition, and in which the world the novel described changed dramatically. I began writing it on 1 January 1984, and it was intended to be strictly contemporary, though it also attempted to sketch in, through the diaries of an eighty-three-year-old man, a life that was as long as the century. In the summer of 1984 a close friend of mine developed a puzzling inability to heal or recover from minor ailments, and by early November he was dead.By the time I was completing the book, in the summer of 1987, thousands of people were dead and dying of the same condition, and I, infinitely more trivially, was faced with an artistic problem. Should I adjust my depiction of the gay world to reflect what was happening? Should I add a dark update to its episodes from gay history? For various reasons, both of taste and technique, I decided to close the narrative in the late summer of 1983; but any reader in the late '80s and onwards would see that the young narrator's heedless present day had become historical in the ways that he, and I, could never have predicted.[1]
It is interesting to think about this quote in light of William and Lord Nantwich's own discussions of their "gay past:"
'I'm always forgetting how sexy the past must have been—it's the clothes or something'
'Oh, it was unbelievably sexy—much more so than nowadays. I'm not against Gay Lib and all that, of course, William, but it has taken a lot of the fun out of it, a lot of the frisson. I think the 1880s must have been the ideal time, with brothels full of off-duty soldiers, the luscious young dukes chasing after barrow-boys. Even in the Twenties and Thirties, which were quite wild in their own way, it was still kind of underground, we operated on a constantly shifting code, and it was so extraordinarily moving and exciting when that spurt of recognition came, like the flare of a match! No one's ever really written about it, I know what you mean, sex somehow becomes farcical in the past,' Charles looked at me very tenderly. 'Perhaps you will, my dear.'
How many gay men now might say the exact same thing about the 1970s, or pre-AIDS gay life more broadly?
The writing in The Swimming-Pool Library was very good—at times great—but, as with the aforementioned structural aspects, when read in the light of the complete mastery of style displayed in The Line of Beauty it is hard to not read this fine prose as a precursor to something greater.
Every bit as sprawling, discursive, and idiosyncratic as I had heard, but also surprisingly emotional, philosophical, and humorous. The general image of this book as "a crazy guy hunts a whale in between boring chapters on nautical terminology" could not be more distorted. Melville exercises his command over the English language with the same total control as Ahab exerts on his crew, and the sentence-to-sentence construction of each chapter was so captivating that I could have read a full book in the same voice about simple whale facts.
As I read I followed along with Robin VanGilder's chapter-by-chapter blogposts on the book. I found his focus on the character of Ishmael as narrator (the book is really more about the Ishmael writing it than it is the Ahab acting it out) and his obsessive desire for information very enlightening. This angle added yet another inch of blubber to the dense coating of faith, fate, and nature themes which wrap the book's bones.
The Swimming-Pool Library
[1] Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, 3rd ed. (London, England: Picador, 2022), 503; this afterword was originally published in the Guardian August 5th, 2011.