Yasunari Kawabata: Beauty and Sadness

Beauty and Sadness is a 1961–63 novel by Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata. The novel is narrated from the present and past perspective of the characters and how they differed from each other’s point of view. Despite said to not be his best work, it has been described by critics as a novel that provokes the mind and is criticised for its depictions of female homosexuality.

Plot

Opening on the train to Kyoto, the narrative, in characteristic Kawabata fashion, subtly brings up issues of tradition and modernity as it explores writer Oki Toshio’s reunion with a young lover from his past, Otoko Ueno, who is now a famous artist and recluse. Ueno is now living with her protégée and a jealous lesbian lover, Keiko Sakami, and the unfolding relationships between Oki, Otoko, and Keiko form the plot of the novel. Keiko states several times that she will avenge Otoko for Oki’s abandonment, and the story coalesces into a climactic ending.

Soheila Sokhanvari: Rebel, Rebel

The Curve, Barbican

When Roohangiz Saminejad starred in The Lor Girl (1932), the first Persian ‘talkie’, the film had to be shot in Bombay because it was too controversial for an Iranian woman to appear in public without a veil. The film was a huge box office hit but Saminejad suffered terrible harassment; she later changed her name and lived the rest of her life in anonymity.

At the Barbican, she is the first of 28 women depicted by Soheila Sokhanvari in jewel-like miniatures. Each is a labour of love: painted onto calf vellum with a squirrel-hair brush, using the ancient technique of egg tempera. These works are set against epic, hand-painted murals along the 90-metre wall that reference traditional Islamic patterns, designed to dizzy the beholder so that they could contemplate the vastness of the universe and the greatness of God. As you pass Sokhanvari’s mirrored monolith, based on the mysterious form in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), you enter a world in which painting, sculpture and sound combine to induce an equivalent kind of feminist delirium.

Borrowing from David Bowie’s 1974 cult pop song, Rebel Rebel pays tribute to the extraordinary courage of these female stars – who pursued their careers in a culture enamoured with Western style but not its sexual freedoms – and laments their fate, after the revolution in 1979 left them with a stark choice: renounce any role in public life or be forced into exile. The soundscape, which weaves together the voices of iconic performers including Googoosh and Ramesh, is especially poignant since it remains illegal in Iran for a woman to sing in public. Sokhanvari herself fled to the UK as a child, a year before the Pahlavi regime was overthrown; now a studio artist at Wysing Arts Centre, she works every day on representing poetically the complexities of life in pre-Revolutionary Iran.

Exhibition brochure

Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle

Barbican Gallery

In picture gallery: Andy Warhol and Annie Sprinkle

—

Alice Neel is in spectacles, striped chair and nothing else. She is 80, cheeks flushed from the effort of being true to herself – “It was so damned hard.” The paintbrush in her hand is directed straight at the naked breast. One eyebrow is raised, rhyming with an energetically upturned toe below. It is a vision of superlative defiance.

Neel’s self-portrait – by now as famous as she is – rightly opens this startling show. The floor has been painted gold, to match the frame, and her shining intelligence. Neel (1900-84) deserves her cult status in American art: a lifelong feminist, humanitarian, activist and braveheart; a woman who painted stubbornly figurative images all the way through abstract expressionism, minimalism and pop, who received scarcely any coverage or wall space.

An artist with such force of personality she could cajole Andy Warhol into sitting half-naked before her, even though he regarded nudity as “a threat to my existence”. Here he sits in a surgical truss, blanket-stitch sutures still bright from the operation that saved him from Valerie Solanas’s attempt to kill him with her gun. His eyes are shut, as if whatever he is cannot be seen or known through appearance alone, skinny pins in brown trousers, feet dangling in old men’s brogues. We are not our bodies.

And it is the weird fact of our own mind-body coexistence that seems at the heart of Neel’s ungainly style. For no matter how familiar the sitters may be – painters, poets, trade unionists and intellectuals, Greenwich Villagers, Warhol’s superstars – the portraits remain outlandish. There is her trademark blue outline, looping, skimming and scudding round each figure, that doesn’t seem bent on correctness of proportion or old-school description. The heads are always slightly too large for the bodies, the brushwork is never flattering but emphatic; here and there you are looking at garrulous caricature.

An early and notorious painting of Joe Gould, dated 1933, shows the wildly eccentric writer surrounded by tiers of male genitals (he has several sets of his own) dangling around like Christmas baubles. Yet even with all this going on, Neel’s brush takes you back every time to the central fact of his gleeful face.

Neel painted right up to her death and was known to phone friends to exclaim: ‘Guess what, I’m still alive!’
Face versus body, the mind in spite of the physique, or perhaps the life itself: that seems a steady fascination. The art critic lies back, voluntarily naked, in the thick pelt of his own body hair: an ape of an odalisque. The pregnant woman, also naked, tries to hold steady on a too-small chair as the new life inside threatens to topple her. The Marxist activist hooks one leg over the chair and raises an arm to expose the dark hair in her pit and yet it all goes awry; the seductive pose, the clothes and the anxious intelligence in her face are at odds.

This show takes a wider and more political view of Neel than most. Here are her paintings of the Uneeda biscuit factory strikes in 1936, police bearing down on workers, innocent children picked out in blood red. Even the horses look oppressed. From the same year, a staggering scene shows protesters marching through Manhattan with “Nazis murder Jews” written on their banners. Neel was among them, her painting historic testimony. Never forget how people knew.

The presentation is also duly biographical. A 1926 portrait of Neel’s first (indeed only) husband, the Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez, who all but kidnapped their child, has overtones of El Greco. Later, her lover John Rothschild is always depicted naked except for his prissy little slippers. In one portrait he is shown peeing in the sink as he examines a strange little wriggling critter in the palm of his hand. He doesn’t seem in on the joke.

But others do. The main gallery is a kind of all-together-now vision of a certain time and place: downtown Manhattan in the 1960s and 70s. The art historian Linda Nochlin tries to keep her daughter composed. The art critic Gregory Battcock comes out in a pair of bright yellow underpants. The poet Frank O’Hara shows his nicotine-stained teeth in a rictus of nervous tension. Only the local taxi driver Abdul Rahman appears tickled with conspiratorial laughter to find himself now her sitter and not the other way round.

And this is surely what they went for: Neel’s company in this studio collaboration. For her personality is as important as theirs to every painting. Sometimes it is evident that they don’t quite know it, of course. Superstar poet and artist Gerard Malanga’s practised pout is a part of his slightly dim performance (and his vanity). One of two Wellesley girls in a double portrait leans directly towards the painter with ardent curiosity, as well she might. Neel, talking in a late documentary at the show’s end, was easily as fascinating and eccentric as any of her sitters. The gusset of the girl’s tights is beginning to show.

This is a terrific selection, superbly curated by Eleanor Nairne and her team with utmost empathy (and the most eloquent captions you will find). It never betrays Neel by sidestepping the graceless, sorry or awkward in her art, just as she never ignored it in life. Her method, Neel said, was to converse with her sitters until they unconsciously assumed their most characteristic pose, thereby revealing “what the world had done to them and their retaliation”.

Laura Cumming in The Observer

Wildlife

his handsomely made, meticulously acted period picture is an impressive directorial debut for Paul Dano – and a triumph for its production designer Akin McKenzie and cinematographer Diego García, who create some soberly beautiful tableaux of postwar American life.

With his partner, the screenwriter and actor Zoe Kazan, Dano has adapted the novel by Richard Ford about Joe, a teenage boy who has moved to a small town in 1950s Montana with his parents. They are on the genteel middle-class poverty line, living from pay cheque to pay cheque, and then to lack of pay cheque. When Joe’s restlessly angry and unemployed dad leaves to take a low-paying job fighting wildfires up in the hills, it ambiguously signals the end of the marriage, and Joe is the intimate witness to his mother Jeanette’s private depression and her courage in facing up to her new life choices.

She treats him like an adult, or like an ersatz husband or best friend, and he is poignantly admitted to what writer Betty Friedan would later call “feminine mystique”. He and we see a gradual change in her – she reverts from the cheerful, respectable wife and mother that he is used to seeing around the house, to the sensual and rebellious young woman that his father originally fell in love with. But all this in a spirit of quiet desperation and caricature, as she begins to weigh up what’s involved in accepting the advances of a wealthy, good-humoured car salesman and war veteran whose own wife has left him.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jerry Brinson, the dad, a man who looks permanently gaunt and exhausted, deeply dismayed by his failure to master the American dream or Dale Carnegie-style tricks of achieving popularity and social advancement. When we first see him at work, it seems that he is an assistant at the local golf course, but appears to have calamitously misjudged how up close and personal he is expected to be, actually cleaning the members’ shoes while they are wearing them, an embarrassing servility that jars with his cheery greetings and farewells.

Ed Oxenbould plays Joe, a role that requires what might be considered a series of mute reaction shots, his cherubic face often set in a ruefully suppressed grimace as he impassively sizes up his father’s humiliation and depression and his mother Jeanette’s disappointment with life. Jeanette is played with terrific gusto by Carey Mulligan. It is one of the best roles and best performances, of her career – giving her a chance to display maturity, wit, savvy and the emotional battle scars of life, and taking her away from the rather girlish image in which she has often been confined.

She is a fighter, a smiler, never-say-die-er, but only so long as her husband is prepared to do his part. We see her breezily wave away the issue of a cheque that has bounced at the bank and through sheer persistence get a job as a swimming instructor at the YMCA, a job that allows her to become socially acquainted with a certain adult pupil, her would-be beau, the corpulent, opulent Warren Miller, played by Bill Camp. Once Jerry is off the scene, he invites Jeanette and Joe to dinner at his house. Joe wanders into his bedroom while the grownups are talking and encounters Warren’s leg caliper gruesomely hanging up in the closet, and a hardly less gruesome contraceptive in his nightstand drawer. The relationship takes its course, and it’s Joe who has to get himself to school, get his own meals and wonder what his role is to be in this new fractured family.

It’s an extremely watchable movie, beautifully and even luxuriously appointed in its austere evocation of small-town America – though maybe a little self-conscious in its emotional woundedness. Perhaps the character of Joe himself is its flaw, required to give us nothing much more than wordless dismay or acceptance of everything that is going on. His face is often seen in silent closeup, but the movie does not give us the kind of access to his feelings that we have with Jerry or Jeanette. Joe is, incidentally, working part-time as the assistant to a portrait photographer in town, and Dano periodically gives us nicely observed still images of the customers’ heartbreaking family portraits: a bourgeois-aspiration effect that has been used in Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies and Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. Dano has given us a satisfying drama of damaged lives.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian

After Yang

This entirely absorbing movie from Korean-American director Kogonada is adapted from a short story by Alexander Weinstein in his collection Children of the New World; it floats on a Zen updraft of wisdom and ideas. After Yang is an enigmatic sci-fi drama about a family of the future whose AI robot child (a “techno-sapien”) bought by the parents to be a kindly big brother to their adopted Chinese daughter, goes wrong and cannot be fixed. There are touches of Philip K Dick and even Charlie Kaufman, and this is also a pregnant meditation on grief, loss, memory and consciousness.

Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith play Jake and Kyra, who have an adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) – and also AI bot Yang (Justin H Min), a happy, calm, friendly and very lovable figure of Chinese appearance, programmed with Chinese memories and Chinese knowledge, whom the family has grown to love. When Yang goes into an unexplained coma, it is deeply upsetting: a bereavement-shock far beyond the malfunction of some gadget. Yang was bought secondhand, without guarantee, so Jake is forced to take him to a rackety backstreet repairman who reveals that Yang had been implanted with spyware designed to harvest consumer data, but also that much of Yang’s memory had been recorded. From these recordings, which Jake replays against his own memories of the same events, he learns that Yang had been secretly in love with a local coffee-shop barista, Ada (Haley Lu Richardson), who is a human clone – evidently a commonplace phenomenon in these future times, and who suffer from a widespread caste-racism of which Jake is also revealed to be guilty.

The action of After Yang, bizarre and exotic as it is, meditates on what it is to be human and how that may in the future be modified, but it also addresses loss in the present day: our anguished and futile human instinct that death must surely be fixable. Like Kogonada’s previous film Columbus, this is a complex, intelligent, questioning film.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian

Tár

Barbican

A second viewing has swept away – with hurricane force – the obtuse worries I had at the Venice film festival about Todd Field’s entirely outrageous, delirious and sensual psychodrama starring Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, the orchestra conductor starting to unravel and unhinge. I had misgivings then about the climactic element of melodrama – which I now see as a deliberate and brilliant stab of dissonance, brilliantly cueing up the film’s deeply mysterious and surreal final section.

No one but Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt. Her performance will pierce you like a conductor’s baton through the heart – although the real-life conductor Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has complained about the apparent parallels between her own life and Tár’s, and there has never been any suggestion of wrongdoing in Alsop’s own career.

Tár is imagined to be principal conductor of a major German orchestra, addressed by colleagues as “maestro”. She is passionate, demanding, autocratic, with a rockstar prestige and an international touring lifestyle approaching that of the super-rich, and is married to her first violinist, played by Nina Hoss, with whom she has a child. But there are problems in Tár’s life. She runs a mentoring scholarship programme for women, administered by a tiresome, oleaginous would-be conductor, played by Mark Strong, and there are rumours that this is a source of young women with whom Tár has affairs. Her assistant, played by Noémie Merlant (another would-be conductor) appears to be someone else she is keeping on an emotional string, and she is being stalked by another former mentee who has become obsessed with her; Tár has furthermore conceived a tendresse for a new cellist. Meanwhile, her guest masterclass at Juilliard goes sour when a young student, identifying as Bipoc pangender, presumes to dismiss Bach on ideological grounds.

But this movie is not about anything as banal as “cancellation”. Tár suspects that there is something wrong: she is twitchy, paranoid and insomniac. We know from the outset that she is effectively being spied on. There are strange sounds, intrusions and things out of place. And the music itself amplifies the violence just beneath the surface. It could be that Field has fallen under the spell of the maestro himself, Austrian director Michael Haneke, with the refrigerated sleekness of the film’s look and the ideas about revenge-surveillance, the return of the repressed and the tyranny and cruelty in the classical music tradition.

Tár has a job in which hubris pretty much comes with the territory. She has invented herself through conducting: no other profession and no other kind of musical career could have worked. My second viewing made me see that part of Tár’s loss of control is due to her intense reaction to Elgar’s Cello Concerto, which she wanted to perform with her protege: the extravagance and the derangement of the music. It resonates with her and with us.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian

Hanya Yanagihara: To Paradise

Audio book, 29 hours, Athens

To Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara’s vast, complex follow-up to her Booker-shortlisted A Little Life, is a novel of many faces. I could tell you, for instance, that it’s about colonialism and racism in America today; or that it’s a queer counterfactual history (and future) that asks what would happen if sexuality were destigmatised (and then restigmatised); or an elegy for the lost kingdom of Hawaii. Most readers, I think, will concentrate on the book’s longest section, the third, in which Yanagihara writes of a series of pandemics and the way they reshape society in the decades ahead.

To Paradise is arranged in three discrete but interrelated parts. The first, Washington Square, is set in the 1890s in a fictional New York. History has gone through a delicious skew, so that the north-eastern states have seceded from the rest of the US, part of a more general post-civil war rearrangement. Our hero for this section is David Bingham, the dreamy and foppish scion of a banking empire. He lives with his grandfather, Nathaniel, in a beautiful house in Washington Square. The “Free States” based their independence on the question of gay marriage – it seems that, with all stigma stripped away from homosexuality, around half of the citizens choose same-sex relationships.

This section is in essence a love story, as David, “still almost-young”, falls for the 23-year-old Edward, a music teacher. There is another potential suitor for David: the bluff, genial Charles Griffiths, a New Englander. As David attempts to choose between the two men, Nathaniel Bingham looks into Edward’s past and finds that all may not be as it seems. David is faced with a choice: the certainty of life in the Free States or a journey westwards, to California, to paradise.

The second part of the book, Lipo-Wao-Nahele is itself divided in two sections. The first is about another David Bingham, this one a junior paralegal carrying out a semi-illicit affair with his boss, the wealthy Charles Griffiths. It is the 1980s, deep in the heart of a pandemic (which we presume is Aids – it is never named). Even from Griffiths’s opulent Washington Square home (the house is one of the constants in the novel), there is the sense of a city under siege. Yanagihara has always been brilliant on the trappings of the good life, but here there’s an almost fetishistic caressing of material goods, a celebration of luxury as necessity at a time of crisis.

We discover in this second section that David Bingham is “from one of the oldest families in Hawai’i… If things had gone differently, I would have been king.” David is Kawika, heir to a throne that no longer exists. The dark history of the US annexation of Hawaii is too complex to unpack here, but it is one of the key themes running through the novel; how American capitalism warped and curdled Hawaii’s sense of itself. The drifting, gentle David/Kawika, and the narrator of the second half of this section, Wika, David’s damaged and dying father, are collateral damage in this half-forgotten act of colonialism.

The final part of the novel is Zone Eight. Again, the section is split in two, although these two parts interweave and reflect upon each other. One thread is set in the 2090s, two centuries after the novel opens, and is narrated by Charlie, who we learn is a survivor of one of the terrible zoonotic pandemics that swept the globe in the course of the 21st century. She is a strangely blank, affectless character: she fell ill as a child in the pandemic of 2070 and the experimental drug that was used to cure her has half-destroyed her mind. Charlie lives, again, on Washington Square, although the house has been divided into apartments. The world is ruled from Beijing and all the marks of classic dystopia are there: the internet has been shut down, the press is state-controlled, books are banned, the secret police spy on people using insect drones.

This narrative is intercut with letters from another Charles Griffiths, Charlie’s grandfather, who is writing to Peter, a fellow scientist in “New Britain”. His letters begin in 2043 and take us through the dark years of the second half of the 21st century, where each new wave of disease becomes an excuse for increasingly totalitarian modes of control. It’s brilliant and horrifying in equal measure, particularly if, like me, you’re temperamentally disinclined to worry too much about the loss of freedoms in the face of a pandemic. I’m not about to burn masks in Parliament Square, but this is a novel that really forces you to examine your woolly liberal assumptions about the motives behind lockdowns.

Put together, the three sections of the novel combine to deliver a series of powerful statements about progress and utopia, about those who are excluded from our visions of a better world. Yanagihara asks us in particular to move beyond binary configurations of sexuality, race and health, to challenge any political movement that seeks to privilege one group or another based on narrow definitions of identity. We are all multiple selves in the world of To Paradise.

Nabokov said that names carry “coloured shadows” in a novel and the repetition of names across the three sections is on one level quite simple: this is a multigenerational family saga, showing how fortunes rise and fall over centuries, questioning the idea of inheritance and examining ideas of family that extend beyond blood ties. There’s something more than this, though, something that chips away at the verisimilitude of the novel, that asks us to engage in a complicated way with the very idea of characters in a book: these are figures facing similar challenges in different times, but the points of correspondence reveal essential truths about what it means to be human at a time of crisis.

Sometimes literature takes time to digest momentous events: the great novels of the Napoleonic wars, of the Holocaust, of the plague, weren’t published until decades after the episodes they describe. Occasionally, though, a masterpiece emerges from the white heat of the moment: The Great Gatsby, The Decameron, The Waste Land. There’s something miraculous about reading To Paradise while the coronavirus crisis is still playing out around us, the dizzying sense that you’re immersed in a novel that will come to represent the age, its obsessions and anxieties. It’s rare that you get the opportunity to review a masterpiece, but To Paradise, definitively, is one.

Alex Preston in The Guardian

Empire of Light

Elli, Athens

Mentioned music:

Mentioned poets: Philip Larkin (“What are days?”) and W.H. Auden’s (“Death’s Echo”)

The “love letter to the movies” is a tricky genre, teetering on maudlin industry indulgence; my own rule is that any film, on any subject, if it is any good, is already a love letter to the movies. The template tends to be melancholy and bittersweet, a ruin-porn lament for nearly empty theatres and nearly lost youth. Maybe in the future there will be films that are love letters to streaming: sad films showing people watching TV screens that are blank except for the single title card declaring that the streamer has gone broke due to unsustainable debt … before thoughtfully wondering what is on at the cinema.

But Sam Mendes, making his first solo outing as a writer as well as director, has taken the style and substance of this form and revived it with an engrossing, poignantly observed and beautifully acted drama about love, life and the fragile art of moviegoing – starring Olivia Colman and wonderfully shot by Roger Deakins. And he does it with all the more urgency now that cinema is under threat again after Covid. This film takes something from the tenderness and sadness of movies like The Smallest Show on Earth or Cinema Paradiso or The Last Picture Show – adding maybe a little bit of the lonely disquiet of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. But Mendes brings his own distinctive sense of personal drama, his adroit handling of actors and his sweet tooth for catchy jukebox slams, a style I remember from his American Beauty. Here we get invigorating blasts of Dylan’s It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) and Joni Mitchell’s You Turn Me on I’m a Radio.

A depressed cinema manager called Hilary, marvellously played by Colman, works at a (fictional) cinema called the Empire on the Margate seafront in 1981 as Britain swan-dives into recession, unemployment and widespread racism. Hilary is conscientious, with a real dedication to her job: selling tickets, checking receipts, cleaning the auditorium after the show. The people who work at the Empire are family – of sorts – with a grumpy and pompous manager, Mr Ellis (Colin Firth), dedicated projectionist Norman (Toby Jones) and assistants Neil (Tom Brooke) and Janine (Hannah Onslow). But Hilary, who lives alone, and who appears to be in treatment for some undiscussed breakdown the year before, is sliding further into unhappiness, made worse by her toxic relationship with a smugly uncaring married man who says hideously unsexy things during the act itself (“Your arse feels so good in my hands”). And Hilary has a gloomy connoisseurship of the cinema building itself, whose corridors she wanders. The Empire has had to close two of its four screens and the entire upstairs bar due to falling box office receipts: and Hilary is one of the few people who know about this secret, pigeon-infested ghostship chamber of emptiness.

But then the Empire hires a new ticket-seller: Stephen (played with emotional openness and sympathy by Micheal Ward), a young Black man who has an instant connection with Hilary: their relationship blossoms, but the nature of Hilary’s sadness rises alarmingly to the surface.

There are some wonderful set-piece scenes in Empire of Light: everyone, especially the self-important Mr Ellis, is thrilled at the news that the cinema is to get a special regional premiere of that summer’s smash-hit, Chariots of Fire, with loads of dignitaries present – but the big night is marred by a terrible scene that Hilary makes out in the foyer, once the film has begun, which is made more painfully surreal and hilarious by the unmistakable sounds of Vangelis’s electronic theme tune in the background as the shouting commences. There are some other films of the era getting shown, but perhaps it is appropriate that the Empire is showing Being There, starring Peter Sellers, one of his last films and his return to form. (I found myself remembering Sellers’ grim recollection that most of his 70s movies were so unpopular, cinemas would put them on if they needed the auditorium to be empty so they could vacuum-clean it.)

Empire of Light is a sweet, heartfelt, humane movie, which doesn’t shy away from the brutality and the racism that was happening in the streets outside the cinema: the Empire is showing Stir Crazy starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, directed by Sidney Poitier – a message of diversity, if 1981 Britain cared to listen. It’s clearly a labour of love for Sam Mendes: love requited.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian

Alan Hollinghurst: The Folding Star

THE TELLING details of Alan Hollinghurst’s second novel come in threes. At the beginning, his narrator, the stuffily named Edward Manners, arrives in an unnamed Belgian city and takes the number three tram in pursuit of a pretty boy who is then claimed by a third party, his female lover. A general sense of disaffection has brought Manners here, to earn his living teaching English to two teenage boys; Marcel, fat and asthmatic, and Luc, a blond, louche beauty with whom he becomes obsessed. Luc has two friends (the Trio), one a woman who may or may not be his girlfriend, the other a well-hung boy at the school from which Luc has been mysteriously expelled. Marcel’s father, Paul, is the curator of the work of a minor Symbolist artist named Orst, whose obsession with a married actress became the subject of many of his paintings, notably a triptych. And the novel itself falls into three parts. Clever stuff.

The first part focuses on Manners’ navigation of the town, where time seems to have stopped towards the end of the 19th century, and on the gay bars, where he drinks too much. His pursuit of Luc, whom he adores with the insane idealism of a courtly lover, forms the central mystery of a book erotically charged with images of blindness, secrets and spying. Along the way, however, Manners manages numerous one-off sexual encounters. One of these, in a park at night, conveys the thrill of anonymous sex in a few sure strokes: ‘You hadn’t the advantage of being at college together, or persuading yourself you fancied him over drinks or supper . . . The absolute black ignorance was the beauty of it, and the bore . . .’

Some of the best scenes – and Hollinghurst can write scenes that most writers would kill to emulate – come out of the most humdrum experiences, one of them being sex. This is a rare achievement, both because it is so overdetermined a subject and because gay sex in particular has become the defining, exotic characteristic of ‘gay’ fiction, for straight audiences at least.

Our relationship to Manners is ambivalent, which is one reason why the set-pieces work so well. Although he is narcissistic and self-absorbed, he is conscious of it in a way that seems truthful and can be comically endearing. His voice mixes slangy colloquialisms with high-flown, precise notation, perfectly echoing his own, shifting milieu, from bourgeois dinner parties and conversations about high art to bottom-rung porn, telephone sex and rough trade – and his experience of the exquisite, almost metaphysical glow of love, to the carnality of raw lust. In one pathetically poignant scene, he spies on Luc sunbathing, ravishing every tiny detail of his body, while being masturbated himself by one of his lovers.

But the best part of the novel is a lengthy digression on childhood that is both moving and beautifully structured. Manners returns to his native Kent for the funeral of his first lover. Here, ordinary events (the delirious shock of the first sexual encounter, the embarrassment of an ambitious, second-rate father; family scenes around the television) are delivered fresh, as if no one had ever witnessed them before. And Hollinghurst gives us a wicked glimpse of his attitude to heterosexuality when he visits a family friend. ‘I couldn’t help thinking back . . . to the naked prefect he had been . . . the blue veins that ran over his upper arms, the idle beauty of his big cock and balls. Not for the first time I thought what an excellent homosexual he would have made . . . There was always something lacking in those men who had never had a queer phase as boys.’

Yet for all its flashes of brilliance, and its atmosphere of brooding melancholy lit by raging passions, The Folding Star trips over its own cleverness. Hollinghurst seems too self-conscious in his highbrow ambition; his (perfectly understandable) desire to break the straitjacket of ‘gay fiction’ leads him into overwrought themes and settings.

This is especially seen in a tiresome, superfluous subplot involving the painter, Orst, and his death at the hands of the Nazis, which reprises the patterns of betrayal and obsession that animate the central narrative. And there’s a hastily assembled, melodramatic final section, which sees Manners zooming off to find Luc, who, true to the convention of the muse, vanishes as soon as he becomes in some way real to his creator. The disadvantage of having a myopic narrator is that the reader is often one step ahead, and so many of the novel’s ‘surprises’ seem grindingly predictable.

This is a shame, because Hollinghurst has talent to burn, a distinctive style and an intellect that needs no such embellishments. He really shouldn’t worry so much; his claim to a place on the literary top shelf will one day be truly deserved.

Helen Birch in the Independent

Irving Park

Triana, Athens

Irving Park is the story of four gay men in their 60s, living together in Chicago, and exploring an unconventional lifestyle of master/slave relationships. A family based on free choice and the consent to lose one’s personal freedom in favor of the desire of the Other.