Alan Hollinghurst’s Elegy for Britain

It is hard to think of another living writer who produces structures as ebullient and dirigiblelike as Alan Hollinghurst does. His first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), depicts London streets, tube stops, pubs, and gym locker rooms as an infinitely detailed region of aspiration, desire, and finely tuned observation. In The Stranger’s Child (2011), poetry isn’t a matter of words on pages, but how those words pulse with physical and emotional resonance over a century of insular Oxbridge social life. In fact, it’s hard to think of anybody else today who writes what Henry James would describe as a contemporary “romance,” work so filled with self-sustaining imagination that it lifts off the ground and takes you to places not entirely of this world.