The Folding Star: A Novel

Alan Hollinghurst is certainly a crafty wordsmith. This book is beautifully written. The story is basically that of an aging gay male becoming obsessed with his beautiful young student. Edward Manners becomes the tutor for a wealthy high school aged fellow, Luc. At first Edward sees a thin immature youth but as the story progresses, Edward becomes more obsessed with Luc and the descriptions of Luc change to match Edward's changing perception. This portion of the story is well told and certainly accurately portrays the process of obsession that seduces gradually, obliterating common sense and good judgement. Edward recognizes that he has lost his bearings when he finds himself continually thinking about Luc, spying on him when he is on holiday with his friends, imagining him having sex with other young men or women, remaining fixated as to whether Luc is gay or straight, and even leaving tutoring sessions to use the bathroom so that he can smell Luc's dirty laundry. Hollinghurst then begins to break the bubbles or desire that Edward has created. Luc becomes more realistic and less idealized. He becomes more human and more mundane. Eventually all the questions Edward has about Luc are answered, or at least many of the questions are answered. Edward begins the painful process of healing the wounds left by obsession as Luc drifts out of his life. I found the book to be one of the best descriptions of the natural history of obsession since Robert Plant's The Catholic. Obsession is revealed to be a wounding, out of mind experience, from which we only gradually recover. Hollingshurst caught it well in this well written book.

The Folding Star was, in my opinion, one of the best books I have ever read. The writing is smooth and flawless, and the everything was beautifully and carefully constructed. Despite the fact that this book is about a controversial topic, homosexuality, I believe that it should be judged by its quality, which is outstanding. What made me enjoy this book the most was the rich variety of emotions that it provoked. Happiness, anxiety, fear, love, hate; they're all in this book, and they are brought about perfectly. The ending, in particular, provokes haunting, mixed emotions that will not be forgotten simply because the book has ended.

Hollinghurst makes not a single misstep here. The Folding Star is carefully wrought, and beautifully written. It's is reminiscent of Villette at first, but the world evoked is far more complex, as are the emotional lives of its characters. I think this is one of the finest contemporary novels and it certainly raises the bar for contemporary gay fiction in particular. And in the year since I read this book, I've picked up dozens more hoping each time that I'll have an experience as intense and as satisfying as when I read The Folding Star.

From Edward to Luc to Orst, the characters lept from the pages of this book and continue to saunter in my memories long after I finished it. I'm afraid to say that I found myself in all of them at one point in my life (perhaps in many of our lives); the seducer and the innocent. (One thing's for certain, I wish Patrick were real...I'd have loved to have met him...perhaps I would have been obsessed as well.) Definitely one of the better renditions of obsessive love that I have ever read. What an amazing accomplishment this novel is...simply beautiful.

If you read Hollinghurst's first novel THE SWIMMING POOL LIBRARY, you know that the excellence of his writing puts him more in a tradition with the likes of such masters as George Eliot, Henry James and E.M. Forster than in the tradition of contemporary gay fiction, no matter how boldly graphic some of his moments might be. But whereas SWIMMING POOL LIBRARY is a breakneck tale of reckless, amoral and privileged youth before AIDS, THE FOLDING STAR is in some ways its spiritual successor - its mid30s protagonist has experienced enough loss (of his father, several friends, a first love) to have shed the certainty and arrogance that characterized the first book's young subject, and has fled his English hometown to a small unnamed city in Belgium where he becomes the tutor of two high school boys, one of whom, Luc Altidore, the subject of a previous mysterious "scandal," becomes his obsession. But as in LOLITA, the obsession is as sad as it is perverse, reflecting back more on Edward's (the protag.) receding youth and present aimlessness than on the attributes of the boy himself, who, like Lolita, is revealed coyly and only half outside the shadow of Edward's own projections. Midway through the story, Edward goes home for the funeral of an old friend and boyhood lover; this is where Hollinghurst conjures all of Edward's past in a half-dream of recollections (one of which reveals the haunting source of the book's cryptic title), and when Edward returns to Belgium for the astonishing final third of the book, the reader is finally able to look at his present rudderlessness as sequel to a past too stiflingly rich in memories. Indeed, THE FOLDING STAR seems less a meditation on erotic obsession than it does on memory and loss, all its memories of emotional and sexual awakening evoked in such beautifully spectral terms that by the end the book's real fetish seems to be the past itself -- a distinctly British, Wordsworthian past where people, hills, even stars become the repositories of memories almost too precious to express aloud. If THE SWIMMING POOL LIBRARY was a fast and shocking read, THE FOLDING STAR is thoughtful and melancholy - but I'm hard pressed to think of a late 20th century writer who depicts both the outer world and the inner life in prose as exquisite and moving as Hollinghurst