The Limits of Subtlety
I had to read Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty earlier this semester for my seminar on contemporary novels in English. I didn't really take to it at first—to me, it was full of beautiful sentences, but left me cold. After discussing it in class, though, I started to warm up to it a bit, and I hope to re-read it at some point in the future. So, to get to the point, there's this one particular passage that struck me. It's towards the end of the novel: the protagonist Nick—a Ph.D. student whose dissertation topic is "style," and whose own style is heavily indebted to Henry James ("plums of periphrasis" comes up at one point)—is writing a letter of condolence to the mother of a lover—his first lover—with whom he lost contact long ago, but recently learned had passed away. As follows: