MERELY PLAYERS

Race, politics, and the theatre collide in Alan Hollinghurst's

- GILES HARVEY

When Alan Hollinghurst published his scandalizing début, “The Swimming-Pool Library,” in 1988, the lives of gay men were hardly virgin territory for the English novel. Some years earlier, as a graduate student at Oxford, Hollinghurst had written a master’s thesis on “the creative uses of homosexuality” in three of his more guarded forebears—E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank, and L. P. Hartley—though there the emphasis, naturally enough, fell on “the stimulating effects of constraint.” “The Swimming-Pool Library,” by contrast, was a work of revolutionary candor that laid bare, in exquisite prose, the cut and thrust of queer existence in early-eighties London. Its attitude toward the euphemistic delicacy of a previous era is nicely encapsulated in a moment from a novel that Hollinghurst came out with three decades later, “The Sparsholt Affair,” when a character spots on an acquaintance’s wall “a red chalk drawing of a naked man, with a body-builder’s chest and ridged stomach, artily cut off at the knee and the neck, and with a highminded blur where the cock and balls should be.” A high-minded blur will never do for Hollinghurst, the great depixelator of carnal truths.