Alan Hollinghurst’s Elegy for Britain

It is hard to think of another living writer who produces structures as ebullient and dirigiblelike as Alan Hollinghurst does. His first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), depicts London streets, tube stops, pubs, and gym locker rooms as an infinitely detailed region of aspiration, desire, and finely tuned observation. In The Stranger’s Child (2011), poetry isn’t a matter of words on pages, but how those words pulse with physical and emotional resonance over a century of insular Oxbridge social life.