Issyvoo

It almost seems as if Hollinghurst is refuting the most commonly made criticisms of his work: that he’s not very interested in women; that there’s too much sex; that his writing is too lush; that his characters are not likeable.

The Stranger’s Child is a profoundly nostalgic book, in the strict Greek sense of “homesickness”: it longs to go home to the prelapsarian past, from whose sensuous immediacy (two lovers in a wood) we have been exiled into the rootless present. The modern world (and indeed the world of modernism) appears to have few positive qualities.

The Stranger’s Child is […] a kind of self-deciphering code, and one that helps decode the larger project of Hollinghurst’s fiction: to track the emergence of homosexuality, that “unimagined and yet vaguely dreaded thing” as a shaping force in British society at large, shaping not only through liberalization but also under repression.

The deliberate elegance of the prose makes a certain point. Style, in Hollinghurst’s work, is the great leveler—it brings within the orbit of serious fiction subjects and acts that other writers, even gay writers, might “tastefully” elide.