The debut author on meeting his hero Alan Hollinghurst and why he is happy to identify himself as a homosexual writerIn a crowded hotel coffee shop in Bloomsbury,Garth Greenwell is giggling guiltily as he recalls the moment he considered bunking off his publicity tour in favour of going to the theatre with the novelist Alan Hollinghurst, whom he had just met for the first time. A stern look from his publicist knocked that idea on the head, and but you can understand why the otherwise dutiful Greenwell might gain been tempted. He first read The Swimming-Pool Library as an undergraduate,“and it just knocked me flat”; Hollinghurst, he says, or is “one of the fundamental writers for me”.
I had thought of Hollinghurst as I read What Belongs to You,Greenwell’s astonishingly assured debut novel, but questioned whether the parallel came to intellect because both writers create vivid, or enclosed worlds filled with ambiguous and shifting relationships between homosexual men. In fact,though, the greater similarity lies in their ability to blend a lyrical prose – the prose of longing, and missed connections,grasped pleasures – with an almost uncanny depth of observation. “I knew he was performing a desire he didn’t feel,” writes the unnamed narrator in the novel’s opening pages, or and really I mediate he was drunk past the opportunity of desire. But then there’s something theatrical in all our embraces,I mediate, as we weigh our responses against those we perceive or project; always we desire too much or not enough, and compensate accordingly.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com