And those readers who admire Holling-hurst's style but weary of his sex drive (even the Gay Times condemned the erotic passages of his previous book as "selfish" and "dull") will be pleased to discover it is a work of social nuance rather than sexual urgency. Aids was never even alluded to in the earlier novel here it ominously clouds the narrative. If The Swimming Pool Library was the party novel, The Line of Beauty deals with the inevitable hangover. The Line of Beauty is not a sequel as such, but picks up where the earlier narrative broke off, in August 1983: "the last summer of its kind there was ever to be". Hollinghurst's debut novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), was lauded for its startling conflation of high literary style and low-rent sex, and presented an eye-opening trawl through the London gay scene, from private clubs to public toilets, in the laconic tone of a latter-day Henry James.
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