SOURCE: "England Calling," in Manchester Guardian Weekly, August 28, 1994, p. 29.

[Woods is chief literary critic for the Guardian. In the review below, he lauds Hollinghurst's focus on and elegiac evocation of England, English society, and childhood in The Folding Star.]

A lot of people have noticed that Alan Hollinghurst's second novel [The Folding Star] is "beautifully written" of course—people now use this phrase very soothingly, as if it were the solution to a puzzle. Certainly, Hollinghurst's language, with its patrician roll, and its self-savouring languor, is worth keen attention; but the novel's real achievement is to have created a viable contemporary English prose, peachy with remembered glows, but not mopingly retrospective.

This is not a negligible or insular achievement. Post-war English fiction has, largely, been unable to tell convincing national epics; instead of English novels, we have novels of Englishness (most egregiously in Peter Ackroyd's work). Balzac called...