SOURCE: "Dawdling Gay," in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 7, No. 306, June 10, 1994, p. 37.

[In the review below, Hollander provides a mixed assessment of The Folding Star.]

It is odd that nothing more in the way of an aesthetic has emerged from our fin de siècle than those cod modes designated by the drab prefixes post- or de-. The last end-of-century produced the movements of Symbolism and Decadence, from which emerged the modern sensibility. In The Folding Star, Alan Hollinghurst tips his hat to them, while enlisting their help to build an aesthetic and, indeed, an aestheticism for our time.

A large part of that aesthetic is homosexuality, of a particular kind. Like the similar narrating "I" of Hollinghurst's debut novel, The Swimming Pool Library, Edward Manners—the hero of his second—seesaws between affectless cruising and an obsessional yearning for a non-negotiable love-object, again an adolescent.

Whereas the earlier...