> >http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/books/alan-hollinghursts-strangers-child-is-a-departure.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28 > > > > >October 31, 2011 >For a Basso Profundo, a New Literary Tune >By CHARLES McGRATH >Alan Hollinghurst, whose new book, “The Stranger’s Child,” is just out, does >not immediately seem like the kind of writer whose first novel included what >amounts to a field guide to the variety of male genitalia. “There are only so >many ways one can describe a penis,” he told British Esquire not long ago, >“and I think I’ve covered most of them.” > >Mr. Hollinghurst, 57, is courteous, dignified, a little formal. He has a voice >so deep and rumbling that at The Times Literary Supplement, where he was an >editor for many years, he was nicknamed Basso Profundo. These days with his >short, neatly trimmed gray beard, he could easily be cast as a supernumerary >in a Wagner production. > >The profundo part may also have been a tribute to Mr. Hollinghurst’s >formidable erudition. He’s known in literary circles for compiling something >called Nemo’s Almanac, a demonically difficult quiz that requires participants >to identify obscure quotations from obscure writers. Yet “of all my writer >friends,” said Edward St. Aubyn, a fellow novelist, “he’s the one who knows >the most about the other arts — music, painting, architecture.” > >“He was a marvelous editor, very reserved in his judgments,” Jeremy Treglown, >a former editor of the supplement who hired Mr. Hollinghurst, said recently. >“I learned to listen to his silences.” > >Mr. Treglown also recalled that Mr. Hollinghurst’s résumé mentioned that he >meant to pursue an interest in gay literature. “Given that he was coming to >work for Rupert Murdoch, that was a pretty clear statement of intent,” he >said. > >In 1988, while still working at the Literary Supplement (he left in 1990 and >worked part time for a few years afterward), Mr. Hollinghurst published “The >Swimming Pool Library,” a novel that did for gay sex and desire more or less >what John Updike’s “Couples” did for the heterosexual kind: described it in >prose that was lush, finely wrought and unusually explicit. > >In New York last week Mr. Hollinghurst said that his intention had been to >take gay life as much for granted as most novels take life among >heterosexuals. > >“I was aware that I had this very great stroke of luck, really, to have this >large subject and a chance to do something both explicit and unapologetic,” he >explained. “I did have a feeling of novelty about the whole thing. It was >interesting to me that it hadn’t happened before. Gays hadn’t really been >written about much in literary fiction, and the kind of writing there was >about gays’ sexual lives tended to be pornography.” > >Over the next 15 years Mr. Hollinghurst published three more novels: “The >Folding Star” (1994),“The Spell” (1998) and “The Line of Beauty” (2004). Each >was well received (“The Line of Beauty” won the Booker Prize); and even as his >prose grew more elegant, Jamesian even, each in one way or another continued >his project of chronicling gay life in Britain in the second half of the 20th >century. > >“When I started out, I did think of myself as a gay writer, though not only as >a gay writer,” he said. “I wanted to write for a readership outside the ghetto >and suggest that gays didn’t spend all their time being madly gay.” > >He went on: ” I think that gay writing, gay fiction, had its point, its >urgency, through all those years, and then the AIDS crisis added another huge >story. But lately, with all the social and legal changes, and the way the >perception of gay people has changed, I feel that gay writing is already >dissolving into the main body of writing. I sort of feel we’ve moved on.” > >The new book is something of a departure. It’s a historical novel of sorts, >spanning almost 100 years, and told in five discrete sections, set in 1913, >1926, 1967, 1978 and 2008, in which new characters are introduced and old ones >fade into the background, only to re-emerge, older and greatly altered. There >is a gay tryst scene, but by Hollinghurst standards a pretty tepid one, and >one of the main characters is a woman. > >At the center of the novel is a bisexual Rupert Brooke-like poet named Cecil >Valance, who while visiting the home of an Oxford chum, writes a poem, >destined like Brooke’s “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,” to enter the national >mythology. The work is second rate at best, and like Valance himself, who dies >in World War I and becomes a cult figure, it’s a little mysterious. Was it >written for the Oxford boyfriend or for his teenage sister, whom Valance also >makes a pass at, and why does it so capture the public imagination? > >In the end “The Stranger’s Child” is a study in the vagaries of literary >reputation, the untruths of biography and even of the shifting nature of the >British class system. The novel has been mostly well reviewed — Thomas Mallon >in The New York Times Book Review called it “fresh and vital” — but a few >critics, notably James Wood in The New Yorker, have complained that it’s too >musty and literary and insufficiently carnal. > >“I guess they wanted more of the old raunch,” Mr. Hollinghurst said, shaking >his head and laughing. “I thought it was rather nice not to repeat myself.” > >Growing serious, he added: “I think I spent rather too long in a category, and >I wanted to get out of that category without in any way repudiating it.” > >What interested him in writing “The Stranger’s Child,” he said, is the way >history alters things. > >“In the first part I felt the shadow of E. M. Forster was hanging over me >perhaps too much, and I found myself slipping into pastiche,” he said. “It >got easier when I got to 1967, because I had the advantage of real memories. >But it’s a strange feeling to see periods of one’s own life turning into >historical epochs.” > >Mr. Hollinghurst lives alone and is almost hermetic in his habits, writing >with painful slowness. It takes him so long, he explained, not so much because >he is an endless reviser and rewriter as because he is both vain and anxious >enough to want to get things right the first time. > >“He goes into this internal exile,” Mr. St. Aubyn said. “He goes out once a >week and has one glass of wine. I have to go on writers’ retreats in other >countries, but he does it all in his own flat.” Mr. Hollinghurst said he >modeled his work habits on another friend and novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro. “He >has this thing he calls ‘the crash,’ ” Mr. Hollinghurst explained. “He takes a >lot of time to prepare a novel, just thinking about it, and then he draws a >line through his diary for three or four weeks. He just writes for 10 hours a >day, and at the end he has a novel.” > >He laughed and pointed out that for him the Ishiguro method was only partly >successful: at the end of three or four nonstop weeks he is still years away >from being done. > > > > >
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