[An American critic and educator, Kirp frequently writes about educational matters and issues related to gay culture and politics. In the following negative review of The Folding Star, he compares the novel to other recent works by gay writers. Acknowledging that Hollinghurst occasionally offers telling moments and details in his portrait of gay culture, he describes the novel's protagonist as pathetic and the plotline as "crudely visible" and "patently artificial."]

During the dozen years between the 1969 Stonewall riot and the advent of AIDS, a host of writers reinvented gay fiction. (Lesbian fiction was also being reconceived, but that's another story.) Banished were the accounts of wracked consciences and suicides in the making, tearstained tales of tea and sympathy. Gone as well were the coded references and coy asides of writers who, afraid for their livelihoods in straight America, dared not even reveal their names.

"Come out! Come out!": The political anthem of that era echoed in fiction that unceremoniously tossed out the old conventions as if they were last year's Halloween drag. Storytellers of varied persuasions—among them Andrew Holleran in the almost mythical Dancer from the Dance; David Leavitt in the New Yorker-ish short-story collection Family Dancing; and Larry Kramer in the blunt, in-your-face Faggots—found a new subject to write about. They paid attention not to the swooning and the doomed but instead to gay men who had ripped the doors off their closets and were hellbent on discovering their own true selves.

Alan Hollinghurst's first novel, The Swimming Pool Library, caused waves of excitement when it appeared in 1988—deservedly so, for it is the best account of contemporary gay life by an English novelist, perhaps the best in the English language. The dish is as good as anything Armistead Maupin serves up in Tales of the City, the bedroom romps as frequent and explicit as (if lots more imaginative than) vintage gay porn. This is vintage gay shtick, but it is also so much more. The novel mainly takes place on the eve of the AIDS era, when neither death nor disclosure but wrinkles and paunches—the stigmata of sexual undesirability linked to the inevitable, brute fact of growing older—haunt life in the gay fast lane. Its story line, which swerves from high life among the London glitterati to encounters between colonials and natives in Africa half a century earlier, is as intricately constructed as a nested set of matryoshka dolls. In less capable hands, such an ambitious amalgam of sex and sensibility could easily have gotten out of hand, become self-parodic. Yet Hollinghurst succeeds, as each of his episodes—black-tie nights at the opera; fag-bashing punks in East London council housing; a scene at Heaven, the London gay nightclub of the moment where stars flame and gutter; and cruising, in both senses, on the Nile—is a finely etched Hogarth sketch for our times, these sketches building on one another to form a powerful, unexpectedly moving narrative.

Although the narrator, Will Beckwith, is a perpetually triumphant cocksman for whom love and lust are entirely synonymous, this is no mere toting up of the sexual numbers. James, a harried doctor and a friend since Oxford days who lives much of his social life vicariously through Will, hovers over the proceedings as a kind of conscience. Stealing a read of James's diaries, Will comes upon a description of himself as at once luminous and

"insufferable…. What a jerk! no regard for my feelings."… It was like suddenly finding out that someone I knew quite well had been leading a double life: the delectable blond super-stud I loved so much was really a selfish little rich boy, vain, spoilt and even, on one stinging occasion, "grotesque."

When Will undertakes to write the biography of the aging Lord Charles Nantwich, he discovers a personal history splashed with poignancy, even tragedy: Will's grandfather, himself a Lord and the doyen of the opera box Will frequents, turns out to have ruined Nantwich's life through exposure and criminal prosecution. As James, the moral compass in the here-and-now, is threatened with prosecution for some modest debauchery (the historical revelations setting up the modern as echo), Will realizes that he is a privileged member of a gay world that, for all its claims to liberation, still depends overmuch on the winking tolerance of the powerful. That abrupt awakening prompts a tentative stirring of conscience—even as Will, sexually insatiable as ever, spots a promising new adolescent conquest.

Perhaps nothing could have topped this debut, though in The Folding Star, his new novel, Hollinghurst tries very hard. Some of the literary tricks are familiar: Down-and-dirty sex gets played off against high art; complex narratives are constructed to run in tandem; and a mysterious past is replayed with a new cast of present-day characters (similar in some respects to William Vollman's attempts to fuse past and present plot lines, as in The Rifles most recently).

As the story begins in 1988, the narrator, slightly paunchy 33-year-old Edward Manners, has fled from England, where so many of his contemporaries are dead or dying of AIDS, to an unnamed Flemish city. He has agreed to give English lessons to two adolescents: Marcel Echevin, a timid and pudgy specimen whose asthma keeps him from attending school; and Luc Altidore, well-read and high-spirited, ravishing in a fair-haired, high-cheekboned sort of way, expelled from the (unsubtly named) St. Narcissus School for sins that, though never specified, are plainly of the flesh.

These boys transform Edward's life, one indirectly and the other frontally. While Marcel himself doesn't interest Edward, it is through Marcel's father, Paul, the curator of a local art museum, that Edward grows fascinated with the paintings of a turn-of-the-century symbolist named Edgard Orst, eventually relating his own fate to Orst's life-long obsession with his mistress. Meanwhile, Luc becomes Edward's own obsession. Even as Edward takes up in a desultory sort of way with Cherif, a sexy Moroccan, and later with Matt, a shady but drop-dead gorgeous young man, the tutor endlessly imagines himself as Luc's lover, torturing himself like a lovesick flagellant.

The two stories, Orst's and Edward's, play out contrapuntally, each with its little astonishments and each ending in revelation. In the course of his biographical researches, Edward discovers that Orst was so undone when his young mistress drowned in the ocean at Ostend that he had to select an almost perfect physical replica—this time, though, a syphilitic whore—to replace her, both in his life and as the subject for his canvases. Meanwhile, in time present, Luc turns out not to be the blushing innocent of Edward's ruminations but rather the sexual plaything of Matt, his sometime trick. Luc disappears, with Edward in fervent if feckless pursuit. He is last seen, contrivedly in Ostend, "robbed of his beauty," a face on a missing persons photo.

Hollinghurst can be a brilliant miniaturist, and at its best The Folding Star pitilessly captures the minutiae of gay life. In a bar on the very first night of his self-imposed exile, Edward Manners tries to pick up a man with the letters R-O-S-E tattooed on four fingers—a man whose "dangerous quality … unspecified challenge, spittle at the corner of his mouth" he finds seductive. It's unsteady going, though, in this tango of approach and avoidance. The stranger stares into his drink, "wave[s] his marked hand dismissively," and Edward wonders why he is bothering with this unpromising specimen; but then the marked man smiles a bit and, following the tired convention, asks Edward what he does for a living. The news that Edward is a teacher "didn't thrill him, it only ever touched those who had liked being taught: I saw a kind of wariness in his eyes, as if he might have owed me an essay." The denouement of this unsuccessful seduction—this hustle that Edward has misread—is painful in its exactitude. "I stroked his forearm," Edward reports, "which I felt actually vibrate with the mastered desire to withdraw it."

There are a number of such shining moments, including a slapstick scene when Edward finds himself playing the role of a hunky American adolescent in a phone sex-line conversation, and a pathetic interlude when the frustrated tutor roots around in Luc's dirty laundry, risking ridicule in his search for a relic to carry off.

There were some white Hom briefs, tiny, damp from a towel they were bundled in with. I picked them out and covered my face with them. They seemed spotless, hardly worth changing for new ones, with only a ghost of a smell…. I buried them at the bottom of the basket, but then some awful compulsion made me plunge my arm in for them again.

But these are only moments, set pieces that don't resonate with each other, in the midst of a narrative that goes on and on without ever signifying. The plot line, with its many forced coincidences, is as crudely visible and as patently artificial as the outlines on a paint-by-numbers canvas. The saga of Edgard Orst is seen through too many literary conceits, and its critical events give off a whiff of melodrama. The flat sameness that pervades Edward Manners's Flemish days—a little tutoring, more sex, lots of pining—is merely pathetic. A trip back to England, for the funeral of his first lover, becomes an occasion for more jokey naming (Rough Common, the old cruising ground), a nod to Mum, an encounter with yet another artist, and clichéd schoolboy reminiscences.

Nor are the characters of The Folding Star especially memorable. While Paul Echevin, the curator, has a richly complex personal history and a multichambered mind, the mind doesn't matter overmuch to Edward, except as a channel into sex. Paul, as it turns out, has his own gay past, but the fact that he is a grown-up makes him undesirable in Edward's eyes, so he is dropped from the narrative as unceremoniously as a jilted lover. Cherif, the young Moroccan, serves as a vessel for Edward's passing lust, another in the lengthening procession of Hollinghurst's boy love-objects. Luc Altidore, the object of abiding veneration, is a set of puns (Luc-Cul, Altidore-t'adore) but otherwise a cipher, a teenager with oddly shaped lips memorable only because he drives Edward wild with longing. Perhaps this vacuousness is intended—after all, Lolita, Luc's literary forebear, was not so scintillating. Yet while Humbert Humbert is rendered by Nabokov as an irredeemably vile body, Hollinghurst has Edward Manners forever moping around, uttering treacle that, though meant to convey a sense of humanity, is merely tedious.

In the decade since AIDS, the transformation of gay literature, its emergence from the shtetl, continues apace. In Martin and John, for instance, Dale Peck has written as wittily complex a narrative as any of Philip Roth's counter-lives. Fenton Johnson in Scissors, Paper, Rock has taken a familiar form, the American generational saga, and bent it into a fine new shape by making its narrator a gay member of the family. There has also been a turning back to explore pre-Stonewall history. Martin Duberman's autobiography, Cures, portrays a survivor of the 1950s psycho-quackery; historian George Chauncey unearths a flourishing gay life during the early years of this century in Gay New York; and novelist Mark Merlis, in American Studies, manages to turn the tea-and-sympathy story on its ear, giving a decidedly postmodern twist to the miserable last days of a 1950s closet case.

The hope, after The Swimming Pool Library, was that Alan Hollinghurst would be the very best of this fine new generation of gay writers, exploring themes that would add nuance and range to the corpus of their literature. Because expectations were so high, that The Folding Star burns out disappoints all the more.