Plot lines of beauty

I am a plot woman.  Characterization, tone, style, word-smithing, clever turns of phrase, psychological acuity - I appreciate them, but with me plot is king.  If the plot falters, so does my enjoyment.  

Not so with the reverse.  I recall Russell Roberts opining that the plots of all P.G. Wodehouse's books were "the same."  To the contrary - Bertie Wooster's and Jeeve's characters may be frozen; the tone, style and amusing word play may never evolve; the overall story lines may remain predictable; but the plots - the plots are always magnificent.  P.G.W. was an absolute genius of the plot (as must be all masters of the long-form comedy, which may explain why they are so few in number).

For this reason, I remain amazed at my own ardor for Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty.  The novel is, in fact, spectacularly plotted . . . but the pace of the plotting is so slow as to be imperceptible until the last forty pages.  At that point, the entire world of the book shatters with such speed and reverberation that the closest analogy to reading the book's last two chapters is living through a head-on car-truck collision.

But why did I keep reading through the first 460 pages?  I know people who didn't - "Same old, same old" from chapter to chapter, they complained.  They put it down 100 pages into it and never picked it up again.

In my case, I kept reading because I marveled at Hollinghurst's astonishing skill at evoking moods that leapt from the page and manifested in a physical experience.  From the scene - on page 10 - when Nick returns to the Feddens' Notting Hill house and intuits a burglary, I was in awe.  I read that scene several times, trying to understand how he'd done it.  "Just words on the page," I hmphed to myself, but they'd cast a spell of pulse-racing, quick-breathing terror and suspense over me.

This suspense - of waiting to see what a magician will do next - kept me reading, and I was not disappointed, from the surprisingly (to a heterosexual) arousing sex scene between Nick and Leo in the park, right through to its bookend, the revolting sex scene between Wani and Tristão at the party with Maggie Thatcher.  The pull of this suspense was plot-like, just as the audience's anticipation in a Cirque du Soleil performance is.

The real magic, though, is that The Line of Beauty was not as plotless as a circus.  Hollinghurst's immaculate mood-conjuring passages distracted from the machinery of the plot, and while I was dazzled by the beauty of his realism - so perfect that I experienced the physical reactions of an eye-witness - Hollinghurst was laying a merciless plot-trap.

His accomplishment suggests a nickname for him, in the tradition of his mentor-of-sorts, Henry James - known as "The Master": Hollinghurst could be known as "The Magician."

(Photo of P.G. Wodehouse courtesy of The Telegraph)