The Swimming-pool Library
by Alan Hollinghurst
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alan HollinghurstEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Import
Published: 2006
ISBN: 0099268132
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Swimming-pool Library
Book Review: Entertaining, but...
Summary: 2 Stars
Everyone seems to rave about this book. It is fairly entertaining, though the constant, nonstop barrage of one-off sexual shenanigans tends to weary this jaded reader. The narrator is such an annoyingly self-obsessed, self-centered waste of time that I had a hard time making it through the end of the book. And then, of course, there is no real end to the book, except that the pages run out. As is typical in so much modern "literary" fiction, nothing is resolved and there is no sense of closure. Which leads me to wonder just what the damn point was. Why was this resolutely unaware narrator created? Yes, he's a type of the young gay pretty boy, and as shallow as that type. I don't bother with them in life, why should I bother in fiction? The other characters do seem to have inner lives, but the narrator is certainly not interested in them, except as they directly impinge on his own (and often not even then; his array of one-night stands is not even up to two dimensions, the underage lovers he has don't seem to exist for him except as cartoon characters to feed his unpleasant need for toys and an audience). And then, after a few non-earth-shattering "crises" (why is he upset that his lover is with another man, when he has, two minutes earlier, left yet another anonymous sexual tryst?), the book simply ends. The narrator learns nothing, grows not one whit, suffers only the barest hints of the stirrings of a conscience, which are swiftly dismissed. If this is empowering, then leave me unempowered. Empowerment is not just reading something that shows we exist, but something that shows us worthy of representation, whether negative or positive. And this character is not a positive representation by any stretch.
For those of us of a certain age it does evoke the carefree, pre-AIDS days, although most of us, despite our boastings, didn't have quite so much anonymous sex as this (the narrator seems to have 3-4 anonymous couplings every 24 hours, which might test the endurance of even the randiest young man).
Frankly, quite unsatisfying to me. But so much of modern literature is, since the stories seem to exist only to get published, not to mean anything. They are long middles, without real beginnings or ends. The influence of The New Yorker is insidious. I notice, however, the reading public at large steers clear and picks less artistically written but more satisfying books that function as stories, with beginnings, middles, and endings that offer some sort of resolution and leave the reader feeling, yes, I've actually read something, I wasn't just dipping into a magazine article while waiting for the subway. Thus the ubiquity of the mystery, the thriller, the romance, and the Stephen King brand of overblown horror.
I'm afraid I won't bother to read more of the author's work; I want good writing, but I'll loof for it to be wed to a story worth telling.
Summary of The Swimming-pool Library
A literary sensation and bestseller both in England and America, The Swimming-Pool Library is an enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. "Impeccably composed and meticulously particular in its observation of everything" (Harpers & Queen), it focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, an old Africa hand, searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.General Books
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