[In the excerpt below, in which he compares The Folding Star to Hollinghurst's first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, Seligman faults the author's development of character in The Folding-Star and argues that his depiction of homosexual love is unconvincing.]

Alan Hollinghurst's 1988 début, The Swimming-Pool Library, made a bigger splash than anyone might have expected of a book that could be labelled, uncharitably but not inaccurately, a gay sex novel. Nicholson Baker documented his enthusiasm in the fourth chapter of U and I and it was typical of the reaction: "Once you get used to the initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex, which quickly becomes really interesting as a kind of ethnography, you realize that this is really one of the best first novels to come along in years and years!" But even allowing for the element of self-parody in Baker's response (which the context makes clear) and tiptoeing around that "disgusting," I think his evaluation misses the point: without all the gay sex, there wouldn't be any novel. It's the book's reason for being, its one distinguishing note. From a formal standpoint, The Swimming-Pool Library might have made its appearance in a much earlier era. Hollinghurst produces an easy, artful, gabby prose that is cushioned with euphony, like one of those grandmotherly English sitting rooms littered with plumped-up pillows. The sedative quality of his language probably isn't incidental to his popularity: if there are readers who might be shocked by what he writes about, they would be reassured by the way he writes about it. But the sex, pervasive and explicit as it is, is so oddly hygienic, so serene, so pleasant, that it seems like a cheat. It lacks the undercurrents of anxiety and neurosis that give choice pornography its thrill. William Beckwith, the aristocratic young man-about-London who is Hollinghurst's narrator and protagonist, approaches every carnal encounter with a gourmand's passion for an enticing new snack. Despite all the evidence he offers of his sensual prowess, I never could believe that he was a very good lay.

Will is meant to be an unreliable and deeply flawed (vain, selfish, shallow) narrator but nevertheless an irresistibly seductive one—both to the succession of beautiful men who start unzipping in their heads the minute their eyes meet his and to his readers, many of whom are clearly taken with his good humor, his fondness for his friends, and the Emma Woodhouse-like improvability that he exhibits when his comeuppance comes. Maybe a decent heart does beat inside that smug cocksman, but I couldn't get past his unkindness. Both Will and his creator have a cold, sharp eye for human imperfections: everyone gets looked at in the unforgiving light of the grading process, and those who are too old or too far or too poor or shy or sad to measure up—well, somebody has to be on the bottom.

The narrator of Hollinghurst's high-aspiring new novel, The Folding Star—nominated for the Booker Prize in England—looks very different from Will Beckwith, at first: he's not rich, he's got no social position to speak of, and at thirty-three he's suffering the first indignities of middle-age spread. But aging and spreading though Edward Manners may be, when he walks into a bar you can be certain that he'll walk out with the most gorgeous trick in the place. Only the truly, incurably heterosexual can resist his lust. Will Beckwith lives. Or at least Edward and Will, unlike the frustrated souls who people the rest of the world, get what they desire. The writing strives for a tone of autumnal resignation—not so premature for a character whose friends are dying of AIDS—but it isn't warmed by much humility.

Partly to put the devastation of his circle in England behind him, Edward has fled to a small Flemish city (a version of Bruges) to tutor two students in English. Sixteen-year-old Marcel Echevin, pudgy and sad, is too asthmatic to go to school; Luc Altidore, troubled, luscious, and seventeen, has been thrown out. Edward at once becomes infatuated, and then obsessed, with Luc. (About the only feeling that he can work up for Marcel, apart from distaste, is pity.) The most serious lapse in The Folding Star is Hollinghurst's failure to develop Luc into an interesting character. Actually, you could argue that it's no lapse at all—that Luc isn't undeveloped, just dull. There are multidimensional characters in both of Hollinghurst's novels, but they're never the male nymphets that Will and Edward drool over. The two men share the J. R. Ackerley syndrome, that peculiarly English ardor for barely schooled lower-class youths, dumb but pretty tabulae rasae on which older men can inscribe their fantasies. Luc differs superficially from the other boys in being richer and more literate, but he's just as big a blank—which is, I suppose, why he's such a turn-on for Edward. (Cherif, a Parisian Moroccan with whom Edward carries on a lackadaisical affair for most of the novel, fits the usual mold.)

Neither Edward nor his creator sees anything too unseemly in a thirtyish teacher slavering after his teen-age charge, and the age split wouldn't be such a problem if Edward weren't so oblivious of ethical borders or so deliriously fetishistic: prying, spying, raiding the bathroom hamper for Luc's dirty underwear, nibbling on his excreta. "I groped for a handkerchief," he remembers, "and of course it was Luc's, not altogether clean, with a trouser-pocket staleness, gummed up with snot which clung in the creases in hard translucent grains, like rice: I placed one on my tongue, half-expecting it to liquefy as in some miracle with a saint's salved fluids." He wants us to regard the object of his fixation as Albertine, when it's obvious, to us and to him, that Lolita is more like it. Nabokov, naturally, doesn't go unacknowledged; there are some halfhearted stabs at Humbertesque farce, with Edward scurrying around out of sight and peeping through curtained windows, and there are flights of purulent poetry like that handkerchief passage. But a fog of wistfulness settles damply over every page. Where Nabokov stokes Humbert's perversity and then demands that we recognize his vileness, Hollinghurst hums mopey little ditties to unrequited love.

And yet there's no convincing portrait of romantic love in either of the novels. There's only hot sex or—when the object is unavailable—mooning, swooning adoration. Edward has fond memories of his parents' devotion to each other, but they belong, in a phrase he uses elsewhere, to "the never fully plausible world of heterosexual feeling." The one gay marriage he mentions involves an old flame with AIDs and his dreary antique-dealer lover, the unavoidable implication being that domestic commitment is a fallback position for those who have been cast out of the disco-bunny life style. Hollinghurst doesn't draw any distinction—I don't think he sees any—between satyriasis and passion, and so the emptiness of Edward's fixation never really strikes him, even though he gives no indication of what Edward wants Luc for except to screw him to death.

Still, no one regards Edward as anything but upstanding and, bizarrely, trustworthy. Even characters who barely know him feel impelled to tell him everything. Their loquacity might make sense if Hollinghurst were offering a wry comment on the social marginality of sexual minorities—playing with the gay-best-friend scenario that's become familiar in the movies—but he has too much ego invested in Edward to see him as anything but central. The reason everyone opens up to Edward isn't psychological but structural: The Folding Star is a Jamesian jigsaw puzzle in which pieces—confessions, in this case—slowly accrete until, by the end, the reader has the big picture. It's such an outmoded way to construct a book, and Hollinghurst lets the machinery show through so nakedly, that there were moments when I wondered if he wasn't being archly, intentionally postmodern. He does all manner of literary acrobatics: word games, mirror images, character parallels, repeated triads—you name it. But the effect of all this meticulous craftsmanship is mainly prissy. It's easy to see why he might feel a kinship with Robert Mapplethorpe, whom he once extolled in a catalogue essay as "both hot and cold, horny and classical, detached and passionate," adding that "the aesthetic and pornographic impulses in him are identified with each other to an extraordinary degree." But Hollinghurst, a highly refined editor of the TLS sunk up to his ears in culture, doesn't have the edge of scary nuttiness that explodes Mapplethorpe's formalism. His amiable jabber is anathema to the subject of obsession. This is not the voice of a man who could take a nosedive into the abyss—any abyss.

It's surprising that Hollinghurst never sets off an erotic spark between Edward and Paul Echevin, the cultivated father of Marcel and the most engaging character in the novel, even though Edward and Paul are drawn to each other intellectually and develop an affection far more substantial than any feeling between Edward and Luc. But intellectual passion isn't Hollinghurst's idea of passion, and older men don't inflame his sexual imagination. He has a different use in mind for Paul: gatekeeper to his subplot. Hollinghurst loves elaborate, important subplots. In The Swimming-Pool Library, the papers of the elderly Lord Charles Nantwich, given to Will to read and organize, become a periscope into the gay world of England and the English before Will's birth. The plan of The Folding Star is considerably more ambitious. Paul serves as the curator of an art museum devoted to a fin-de-siècle Symbolist named Edgard Orst, and, as the Edward-Edgard correspondence suggests, the subplot parallels the main plot; Orst is supposed to have been erotically fixated on a youthful object, too. In time, Edward learns that Orst perished at the hands of the Nazis: as his story unfolds piece by piece, the Holocaust lies waiting at the end. The troubled history of Europe in this century makes an impressive foundation for the novel, which is structured as a journey toward twin revelations, one intimate (Luc), the other world-historical (Orst). But how can you trust revelations from a narrator who is unrevealed to himself?