SOURCE: "Lost Youth," in London Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 11, June 9, 1994, p. 6.

[An American novelist, nonfiction writer, and short story writer, Baker is the author of The Mezzanine (1988), Room Temperature (1990), U and I (1991), Vox (1992), and The Fermata (1994). In the review below, he offers a favorable assessment of The Folding Star.]

Alan Hollinghurst is better at bees than Oscar Wilde. On the opening page of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde has them 'shouldering their way through the long unmown grass'. A bee must never be allowed to 'shoulder'. Later that afternoon, Dorian Gray, alarmed by Lord Henry Wotton's graphic talk of youth's inevitable degeneration, drops a lilac blossom that he has been 'feverishly' sniffing. Bee numero due appears, taking most of a paragraph to 'scramble all over the stellated globe of the tiny blossoms' and further interrogate the 'stained trumpet of a Tyrian convolvulus'. Here again, when you're...