Customer Reviews

The Swimming-Pool Library

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Alan Hollinghurst may be the most intelligent gay English-language novelist writing today, with the possible exceptions of Edmund White and Gore Vidal, but Hollinghurst is neither so precious as White nor so nutty as Vidal. THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY was his first effort, and remains his best. It marvelously captures the life enjoyed by a wealthy, handsome, leisured, and predatory London aristocrat, William Beckwith, in the early Eighties, and the way his life changes when he meets Chalres Beckwith, a titled man whom Beckwith incorrectly assumes lived a life very similar to his own. The novel is basically about the absence of gay history at the time it was written, and the ways in which privilege and security can be taken for granted. The book read very differently in 1988 (at the darkest moments of the AIDS crisis) than it does today, and its message seems less elegiac in many ways than before. It's not a novel without its problems: although Beckwith is clearly intended to be understood as morally blinkered (and he does get a something of a comeuppance eventually), his incessant vanity and self-congratulation does make him eventually a bit of a bore as first-person narrators go. Hollinghurst also witholds crucial information about the plot until the very last fifty pages of the novel, as he did in his next effort THE FOLDING STAR, so that you're not even fully aware of what the mystery guiding the novel's action really is until fairly late in the game. While this makes the final revelation more of a surprise, the book reads much better the second time than the first, when (as again with THE FOLDING STAR) there seems to be little plot to sustain your interest. Most readers have found Hollinghrust's third book, THE SPELL, the weakest of his efforts so far: it will be interesting to see if he can either repeat or surmount the success of THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY.

This novel is well-written, and vacillates between extremely well-written fiction and minutely detailed erotica. The story centers around Will, a promiscuous, narcisscistic, wealthy gay young Londoner in the pre-AIDS era of the early 1980's. Will has no financial or moral restrictions. He leads us on a journey through the hot summer of 1983, that is at times graphic, and also historically engrossing.

Will Beckwith's adventures are by far some of the most graphically-detailed I have ever read, but highly erotic for both gay and straight readers. Concurrently, Will encounters an elderly British Lord who wants Will to write his life story. There is an undercurrent of duplicity in all of his relationships, from his passionate, physical affair with the young, uneducated hotel employee, Phil, to the exact nature of his professional dealings with his Lordship. Also, there is a pitying tone to his relationship with his best friend, a doctor who is also gay, but who is the only person who seems to have Will's heart, instead of his libido.

This is not your ordinary novel. Alan Hollinghurst is an extremely intelligent writer, who can also write with an almost animalistic sense of depravity. It is almost like reading two novels; on one page, extremely explicit sex, on another, intellectual stimulation. It is certainly one of the most unique books of its kind I have ever read.

I recently re-read this book. It is a unique amalgam of very serious, high tone fiction and highly graphic, unadulterated scenes involving the kind of sexuality that would not make it into books that school systems adopt for even advanced high school courses. The narrator is rather selfish, aristocratic, but also appealing, in that, he makes no excuses for his human failings. At times, the depiction of gay haunts and habits is highly satirical, for example, the repeated references to "Trouble for Men," a cologne which wafts through the changing room of the swimming pool club that the narrator frequents [perhaps a dig at the extreme popularity which the Calvin Klein fragrance "Obsession" once had.] There is a two-tier structure to the work that is a little bit hard to deal with: the modern protagonist is contrasted with a man from an older era, whose life in earlier decades, when gay men were more in the shadows is meant to provide a counterpoint to the relative freedom which the younger man enjoys. This book is a rich, complex work which repays close reading and rereading.

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.

I'm enjoying reading this book again and again. I find that strange.

I am a retired Foreign Service officer who spent most of his adult life processing visa applications in overseas countries. Part of this book is about being an overseas diplomat (from England, though, not the USA) and that appealed to me.

But I bought the book completely for its title: "The Swimming Pool Library." I swam in college, way back in the 1960s, and almost made it to the Olympic Trials. And I like books, so the title, "Swimming Pool Library" appealed to me. I'm retired and I was looking for books to fill my library and fill my time.

I didn't know it would be about the homosexual lifestyle, and indeed as a straight man with grown children and grandchildren, I didn't have any appeal for that subject.

But the book has grabbed a hold of me and I've read it three and a half times in the past two months. I guess retirement does something to the human mind...At any rate, it's good writing and the main character gets into some interesting predicaments and I liked the other parts of the book - the diaries from being a British diplomat in Africa - and the gay thing just has me feeling and thinking things I never felt or thought about before, at least not consciously that I know of.

My wife keeps looking at me reading this on the porch but I don't care; if she wants to pick it up and read it herself maybe it would open up some dialog that we should have had decades ago.

I love my wife and my children and grandchildren, and I love this book.

Buy it. You'll be presently surprised.

This is the first "gay genre" book I've read. I bought it because the author just won the 2004 Booker Prize. Alan Hollinghurst writes beautifully. His prose has a certain limpid clarity accomplished the very best English authors. Its form is that of a narrative memoir, and contains within it, in part, diary entries by one of the main characters. In all, The Swimming Pool Library has more of the overall "feel" of a diary than a work of fiction. Hollinghurst's attention to detail is superb; his descriptions of the physical aspects of people, landscapes, and architecture are superb, and his evocation on London night life has a real feeling of authenticity. Strange to say, for a gay man Hollinghurst seems to take a surprisingly dispassionate approach to romance in this book. The author is quite spare in entering into the psychology of his characters in toto, which, in a sense, is appropriate, since the human heart -both our own and others'- remains, for the most part, a delicious and maddening mystery. The only reason why I did not give this five stars is that the last ten percent of the book seems to become a bit befuddled in its plotting, and what resolutions there are appear to be a bit rushed, and not altogether as tightly planned as the previous 90%. In the end, The Swimming Pool Library just seems to peter out, and whatever insight into his characters Hollinghurst had earlier in the book seems to get a little lost. Also, for me, the total lack of female characters made The Swimming Pool Library feel more than a bit claustrophobia-inducing. However, the very best fiction leaves one with a deeper appreciation of the changes and chances of one's own life, and the lives of other people. Hollinghurst beautifully achieves this for the greater part of this book, but loses it at the very end. Unless, of course, there is a "to be continued..." that I missed.

THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY is a literary fiction with a shimmering elegance about a young aristocrat who lives off his inherited estate and leads a life of promiscuity. A chance meeting with Lord Nantwich, an old Africa hand and founder of the prestigious London Wick's Club, lands William Beckwith into a research project that evolves to become the old man's biography. Wovens with his assiduous riffling of Lord Nantwich's materials are nuanced episodes of sexual rapport William engages with men at whom he flirtatiously smiles at the gym. The prose is ebulliently literary and suggestive, but not prurient. Page after page of the novel is riddled with the elaboration of bare intimacy, the explosive liberation of libido, the palpitating anatomy that preludes to carnal pleasure, and the audacious verbalization of physical gestures. Something masculine momentarily bridles as our protagonist ventures into casual number with strangers.

The writing of Lord Nantwich's biography is as much a matter of probing his memory for links and identifications and of reading his personalia as examining his own life for William. The old man's eventful and seemingly eccentric life so often evokes and echoes William's own feelings, and at times brings him to the edge of difficult emotional terrain. The arrival of his anti-gay grandfather, who has spent all his life in circles where good manners, conservative family values, and plain callousness conspire to avoid any recognition or vestige that homosexuality even exists, intensifies the poignancy of such feelings.

Leading his life the way he does, it is strangers who by their very strangeness quickens William's pulse and makes him feel alive. Regardless of the irrational sense of absolute security that springs from the conspiracy of carnal pleasure with men, shares something more genuine and cultivated with his close friend James with whom the friendship is sealed with a playfulness, privacy, tenderness, secrecy and a tacit understanding. William and James somehow enact some charade, whose very subject is secrecy, one that even permits his reading of James' diary from which he is obliged to see himself from his friend's perspective. The friendship, though has remained sexless for a long time, nourishes a nervous pleasure at the certainty of companionship when needed. The friendship preponderates the kind of seize-the-moment relationship William shares with Phil, who might have lived a double life as William begins to suspect at the faintly sickening possibility of his being unfaithful.

THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY exposes the day-to-day episodes of gay life. Nipping into a library of uncatalogued pleasure is a realm of halt, darkness, and unknown possibility. It is in this uncharted territory where the difference between sex and companionship becomes blurry. William's affair with the underage bellboy Phil is one of ephemeral pleasure, glutting eroticism, and raw voluptuousness. Lies beneath all the vivid illustration of desires is the concern of an emptiness that has, for example, manifested in James: when one is beyond love, where does pleasure lie? Is there ever an end to the irresistible, normal craving for sex? Or does this go tauntingly on? The root of his loneliness and eccentricities, his uninvestigated and inhibited private life, is not uncommon to everyone: the humiliation of stark rejection and the terrible feeling that no one ever notices him or remembers him.

THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY, a 1984 debut, is an enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS. It welds the standard elements of fiction to a tale of transgressions with the emphasis being on sensitive and censurable materials. It tells of impurities with shimmering elegance, of complications with a quick wit, and of truths with a fiction's solidity. It embodies a gloomy, sober, and functional underworld-full of life, purpose, and sexuality.

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.

Beckwith is a self-serving protagonist. The man is self-absorbed and has no pathos ...until the unforgiving conclusion. Beckwith is an inspired creature I must admit. We find a man who has all the things he thought he wanted. Does that remind you of someone you know? Beckwith's reminiscences and research of Lord Nantwitch reveal a trove of desire still left unclaimed and unrealized. The comparison and contrast of Beckwith and Nantwitch unmistakably defines Beckwith's situation. He has filled his life with all of the modern creature comforts and has somehow loved himself so much that he now has no one to love him back. The man is utterly alone in his crowded world with no one to understand him. Hollinghurst has made a statement about the value of such living and it is familiar and sad to many of us.

The novel is full of dark and isolated sex and conflict. There is little drama but a lot of thinking going on, until the end. I was disturbed by this novel; it evoked feelings of inadequacy and discontent that I had long shrouded with meaningless little trophies and monuments I had erected to myself.

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.