SOURCE: "Sex and the Single Man," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXX, No. 34, October 24, 1994, pp. 95-100.

[In the excerpt below, in which he compares The Folding Star to Hollinghurst's first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, Seligman faults the author's development of character in The Folding-Star and argues that his depiction of homosexual love is unconvincing.]

Alan Hollinghurst's 1988 début, The Swimming-Pool Library, made a bigger splash than anyone might have expected of a book that could be labelled, uncharitably but not inaccurately, a gay sex novel. Nicholson Baker documented his enthusiasm in the fourth chapter of U and I and it was typical of the reaction: "Once you get used to the initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex, which quickly becomes really interesting as a kind of ethnography, you realize that this is really one of the best first novels to come along in years and years...