His cup runneth over

Nick, the central character in Alan Hollinghurst’s wonderful new novel, is a young, alert middle-class boy with precociously refined aesthetic sensibilities and a gift for endearing himself to others. ‘He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity.’ He has come out as gay shortly before the novel’s opening, but lacks — at least until chapter two — any actual experience. His friendship with the straight son of a junior minister in the Thatcher government — actually a longstanding erotic infatuation kept painfully under wraps — has led to a successful wooing of the friend’s entire family. This has earned him his own room in their big, white Notting Hill house, and honorary status as their all-but-adopted son. Of course, it also entails certain, awkwardly ill-defined responsibilities. ‘What always held him was the family’s romance of itself,’ writes Hollinghurst, ‘with its little asperities and collusions that were so much more charming and droll than those in his own family.’ How involved in this romance Nick should allow himself to become is the chief source of the floating suspense that suffuses the novel.

It is almost unbelievably well-written — 600 pages of finely wrought but tough, close-in observation. Negotiating cocaine, adultery, homosexuality and Margaret Thatcher in a serious novel requires a perfect touch, and Hollinghurst has shown he has it. In its dazzling, very contemporary way, the book is tragic. But it is also consistently funny. (In his study, Gerald Fedden, the Thatcher minister, ‘like an uxorious bigamist, had photos of both [his wife] Rachel and the Prime Minister in silver frames.’) A lot — but by no means all — of the humour derives from Hollinghurst’s explicit descriptions of Nick’s burning libido. At dinner with his new boyfriend’s very religious mother, Nick feels ‘deliciously brainwashed’ by sex: ‘when he closed his eyes phallus chased phallus like a wallpaper pattern across the dark, and at any moment the imagery of anal intercourse, his new triumph and skill, could gallop in surreal montage across the street or classroom or dining table.’