Having won England’s Man Booker Prize for his latest novel, The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst has received the recognition he deserves as one of the finest novelists writing in English today. Edmund White’s fictional achievements notwithstanding (I’ve long felt White is a better nonfiction writer than he is a novelist), Hollinghurst is certainly one of the finest living novelists, if not the best, writing about gay male experience. The Line of Beauty has all the qualities that I’ve admired in Hollinghurst’s previous three novels, The Swimming Pool Library, The Folding Star, and The Spell.