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.’