THE STARS
Posh novels, teacher strike, restaurant scam.
★★★★★ Post-‘80s books about weird, posh, and frequently evil English people
A key dynamic that will confirm you have entered this rarified genre: the rich characters are utterly vulgar (except when the money is old), while the penniless ones possess a priceless, transcendently aristocratic temperament and wit (or so some of these washed-up patricians believe…). First up, if you have not yet read Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 novel, The Line of Beauty, we urge you to close this email right now and secure a copy. The Line of Beauty takes place between 1983 and 1987. It follows Nicholas Guest, a young gay man who moves into the guest bedroom (the nominal determinism is no accident) in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens, the affluent Tory family of one of his Oxford friends. The book traverses Big Topics: Thatcher’s Britain, the hypocrisies of political conservatism, class envy and chameleonism, gay life in Britain at the dawn of the AIDS crisis, addiction, delusions of creative grandeur, and the complexities of being a devotee of Henry James. But it’s also a portrait of a few crucial years in a man’s life, one of those books where you feel completely bound up in the main character’s gradual loss of innocence. The party scenes in particular, with all their stretched out, microscopic attentiveness to social hurts, anxieties, and misapprehensions, are phenomenally good—especially the one where Maggie T herself, who is referred to throughout the book only as “the Lady,” attends an evening affair at the Feddens’ place:
Her hair was so perfect that he started to picture it wet and hanging over her face. She was wearing a long black skirt and a wide-shouldered white-and-gold jacket, amazingly embroidered, like a Ruritanian uniform, and cut low at the front to display a magnificent pearl necklace. Nick peered at the necklace, and the large square bosom, and the motherly fatness of the neck.
A few months after finishing the book (and the very good BBC miniseries), we found ourselves returning to this milieu, albeit 15 years earlier, in the first volume of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series. Never Mind (1992) is set over a single day in an English household in the south of France. It oscillates between the perspectives of five-year-old Patrick, his sadistic father, David, his hopeless, drink-sozzled, pill-popping mother, Eleanor, their various servants and visitors, and a lizard. We were entranced by St Aubyn’s skilful shifts between voices, especially when Eleanor’s hilariously panicked interior monologue careens in. Around halfway through, though, a shocking, traumatic event takes place that completely changes the tenor of the book. We don’t want to spoil it, but our recommendation for Never Mind comes with a note of caution. We thought about it for days after finishing, and are now committed to reading more Melrose. Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac (1984) tells a more sedate tale. It follows a London lady romance novelist living in temporary exile at a Swiss lake hotel and is more concerned with depicting fraught relations between heterosexual women—in particular, heterosexual women who prefer the company of men. Lastly, to bring us to the present day of this fading empire, don’t skip Patrick Radden-Keefe’s London Falling (2026), which follows an ordinary upper-middle-class British teen who gained entry into the city’s elite-cum-criminal underworld by pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch. The private club-attending crims in that almost made us miss the Fedden years.
