The Swimming-Pool Library: A Novel (Lambda Literary Award)

Alan Hollinghurst's "The Swimming-Pool Library" is considered a classic of gay literature (and justly so). However, I contend that this novel is so good that it transcends any such categorization. This is a brilliantly constructed, multi-layered novel rich in both interesting characters and history. An aimless young man (rich and beautiful) leads a life of leisure, replete with hedonistic sexual encounters. Looking for sex in a public restroom, the young man encounters eighty-something Lord Nantwich, who proceeds to have a heart attack. Our hero performs CPR, saves the old gents life, and a friendship ensues. The Lord enlists the young man to write his life story - which as it turns out has been a very interesting life. Lots of other things happen as this relationship developes. Does the biography get written? Well, that's the story, and I'm not going to give anything else away. This is a work of empowering literature. Hollinghhurst is a brilliant writer. Don't miss this beautifully realized book.

Hollinghurst is a beautiful writer and his skill lies in having a series of gay culture stories at each novel's centrepeice while noramilising both event and content. I have spoken to many friends both gay and straight, male and female who engaged with the story, identified with the characterisations and found the book intoxicicating and highly erotic. As well as chronically great work surely his ability to make the marginalised and castigated, mainstream and accepted is intensely undervalued. This book is by far his best work and is filled with restless longing and dissapointment, a sexually journey of mass comparison and appeal. These are not so much "gay" novels as incredibly important "modern" novels, this book has the hallmark of a classic.

Alan Hollinghurst writes superb prose. He is a master wordsmith. In this novel he tells the story of Will Beckwith, a bright young gay man who lives for sex and intellectual stimulation. He is a sexual adventurer in the pre-AIDS era in London. He has one a-sexual/gay physician friend in whom he confides as well as a young hotel employee boy-toy with whom he has regular sex. He takes his sexual freedom and his priviledged class for granted. He meets Lord Nantwich, a gay gentleman in his 80's, and reluctantly agrees to help write Nantwich's memoirs based on his diaries written in Colonial Africa 60 years ago. Thus the stage is set for young Will Beckwith to begin to gain the insight that even though he and Nantwich were very similar in their youth, different age's interpretation and repression of homosexuality can lead to very different life choices and consequences. Gay culture in 1900 and 1980 are compared in the parallel lives of Beckwith and Nantwich. This demonstrates the way gay men of younger generations may take for granted the repression and homophobia that characterized earlier periods. The descriptions of the gay sex are as cooly rendered as the intellectual aspects of the book, Hollinghurst's speciality. Yet despite the cool veneer, Hollinghurst would have us see that it is the awareness, the awakening of class and time priviledge, that allows Will to become more fully conscious and more fully compasionate, and thus more fully alive. I stongly recommend this book for several reasons: it is beautifully written, it explores sexual identify over time, it is erotic, it is intellectually stimulating, it confirms the ability of human's to gain insight and moral character without becoming sentimental.

Englis book stores have those small alcoves that read "Gay and lesbian fiction", which I've always found very funny, say how do you classify In search of lost time: "Gay and straight fiction by gay author"?But I'm digressing... I found Holinghurst's novel on one such shelf and I devoured it, because I liked everything in it: the language, the settings and the characters. I was especially moved by the elderly Lord N. because his story belongs to a time that is lost: Edwardian homosexuality. I am not gay but I am truly fascinated by this era of (relative) sexual freedom that was born in Cambridge and Oxford at the turn of the century, in the shadow of Oscar Wilde's downfal. Nearly all of the Bloomsbury group were gay at one time or another!I cannot say I could relate as easily to contemporary, be it early 80s, gay mores but that hardly matters. On top of it, there are very erotic descriptions of the "love that dared not speak its name" (as Proust wd have said) which I found extremely enjoyable.