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A review by nelsonminar
The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst
4.0
I wish I had someone to talk to about this book! I loved it. Somehow I missed it in my gay culture reading when I was coming out. Glad I read it now, with some distance from it.
So much joy in reading the author's quite enthusiastic gay life. It's a little strange, the book describes a fantasy world of London upper crust where everyone is gay. Everyone at the club, at the restaurant, at the hotel, all gay. And so much enthusiastic casual sex. And friendships, and loves, and complicated human relationships. It's a sort of wonderful fantasy land. This book is usually pigeonholed as a "pre-AIDS book" and while that's certainly true it still seems like an aspirational fantasy of what gay life could be if we lived in a world of full acceptance and as a majority culture.
So I was a bit surprised towards the end when the book takes a turn to the more serious, to addressing police harassment and entrapment of gay men. There's a lovely surprise turn in the book about all this which I won't spoil, but I will say it landed hard and it landed well.
I also like the dissolute writing, the ragged edges and uneven prose and unfinished bits of story. It reads like an authentic memoir of someone's lived life, not a tidy novel with all the loose ends tied off.
Remarkable novel. I need to read more like this, to really center myself in this particular kind of gay male culture.
So much joy in reading the author's quite enthusiastic gay life. It's a little strange, the book describes a fantasy world of London upper crust where everyone is gay. Everyone at the club, at the restaurant, at the hotel, all gay. And so much enthusiastic casual sex. And friendships, and loves, and complicated human relationships. It's a sort of wonderful fantasy land. This book is usually pigeonholed as a "pre-AIDS book" and while that's certainly true it still seems like an aspirational fantasy of what gay life could be if we lived in a world of full acceptance and as a majority culture.
So I was a bit surprised towards the end when the book takes a turn to the more serious, to addressing police harassment and entrapment of gay men. There's a lovely surprise turn in the book about all this which I won't spoil, but I will say it landed hard and it landed well.
I also like the dissolute writing, the ragged edges and uneven prose and unfinished bits of story. It reads like an authentic memoir of someone's lived life, not a tidy novel with all the loose ends tied off.
Remarkable novel. I need to read more like this, to really center myself in this particular kind of gay male culture.