The Stranger's Child

2 ½  Polychromatic Galaxy Skulls                             

Along with the perfectly crafted sentences, lines of beauty, what I have appreciated most in Alan Hollinghurst’s previous novels has been the unification of penetrating moments of clarity into something abysmal and poetic in the human soul, on the one hand, and the complete banality of the lives he describes on the other hand.  He can describe rigidified social mores, unbridled lustful obsession, and a sense of deep sorrowfulness with equal grace and clarity.  At times his prose is refined to the point that it becomes poetically prosaic, which also becomes a thematic in works like The Folding Star (my personal favorite) and Line of Beauty.  He does it all with a sense of aloof detachment that is actually tender.  For these reasons, Hollinghurst was one of my favorite authors, for a spell.

After reading The Stranger’s Child, Hollinghurst is no longer in my pantheon of living writers.  He’s still an amazing stylist, certainly, but for me the last 150-odd pages of his newest novel rattled on in what seemed to be a parody of plot hooks.  Obliquely following the reception of a fictional poet who died in WWI, the novel spans nearly a century.  In the last sections of the novel, the only thing besides carefully crafted sentences that is designed to engage a reader is whether or not the world will discover that said poet slept with men as well as women.  This seems to matter a lot to his biographer, but no one outside of his family even seems to care, much less this reader.  I found myself nodding along with the librarian who, when confronted with the possibility of the poet having been gay, says, “They all were, weren’t they?” (420). 

The Swimming Pool Library covered very similar thematic ground, excavating the repressed homosexual histories of Britain’s aristocratic elite throughout the 20^th century.  That debut novel was less tightly written, but in a sense it was also more ambitious, taking on a variety of voices and genres in a way that makes The Stranger’s Child seem monotone.  (And even The Swimming Pool Library seems monotone next to Byatt’s 1990 novel, Possession, which works on a similar structural and heteroglossic conceit.)   Furthermore, The Swimming Pool Library was published in 1988.  If The Stranger’s Child had been published over 20 years ago, its investigations into repressed biographical histories might have seemed like an intriguing, even liberating, challenge to popular opinion.  But in the second decade of the 20^th century it’s strikingly banal.