The Folding Star

"I think Alan Hollinghurst is my favourite living writer. I think he’s extraordinary. He takes a very long time to write a book – I think he has only written five – so each one takes about six years. This one is my favourite because the writing is so beautiful. It’s about a young Englishman, Edward Manners, who gets bored with his life in England and goes off to teach as a tutor in Flanders. He has two students, one of whom is ugly and another, called Luc, who is unbelievably beautiful. Then there’s a previous lover of Edward’s named Dawn who lived in England and who died of Aids. This is his Aids novel, I suppose. One thing I love about it is that Aids is always there but it’s never sentimentalised. It acknowledges the existence of this terrible disease but at the same time it has an incredible enshrinement of physical love and physical beauty in the affair between Edward and Luc. Yes. That’s right. But the difference is that the boy in Death in Venice never puts out. He seems to be almost unaware of his effect on Aschenbach, whereas Luc actually has sex with Edward. You’re sort of conditioned by this type of book to think that there is this older man who’s mooning after this boy and the boy will never do anything about it, but, in fact, the boy is homosexual and very generously offers his body to his teacher and seems to be smitten by him. So that is an unusual, strange moment in the book. Well I think that’s just because he objected to homosexuality de tout coeur . He was a very narrow-minded working-class man who, even though he rose to the heights of American fiction, nevertheless retained the values of his childhood, which were those of a working-class family. You would think that Hollinghurst would have appealed to him. He did acknowledge how beautiful the writing was, but his objection to the homosexuality was sort of like Nabokov’s objection to Our Lady of the Flowers , which he saw as a masterpiece but thought, “Why isn’t this book about women?” Nabokov hated homosexuality and was very edgy around it, partly because his own brother was homosexual and his uncle. And he believed that it was hereditary, so he was always nervous about it. But anyway, it was a shame that Updike missed that opportunity to acknowledge Hollinghurst’s genius, because Hollinghurst is a writer who has real subject matter, unlike Updike. Updike could only write about suburban adultery and childhood memories. He had no subject matter even though he wrote 50 or so novels. One is more empty than the next. And he’s a writer who will be forgotten, except maybe for his trilogy about Rabbit. That’s true. Maybe he was nudged by the criticism. Alan Hollinghurst is a friend of mine and was actually very flattered that Updike wrote about him at all, even if negatively. In fact, he saw it mainly as a positive review."