This Week's Reads

The Line of Beauty
By Alan Hollinghurst (Bloomsbury, $24.95)

With his three previous novels, Alan Hollinghurst earned a reputation as an exacting writer with a gift for portraying the search for love, sex, and beauty. With his fourth —just announced as the winner of Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize—he lambastes these desires in a tale that is plangent and funny, and perfectly written.

Set between the English elections of 1983 and 1987, Beauty concerns Nick Guest, a 21-year-old Oxford graduate who accepts the invitation to move into the posh Notting Hill mansion of his former classmate, Toby Fedden, and his family. In addition to being Nick's fantasy love interest, Toby is also the son of a Tory MP at a time when the conservatives are sweeping to power. This living arrangement is made rather awkward byNick's blossoming as a young gay man in London. He finds a black lover and takes to calling Toby's sister "darling." The Feddens attempt to seem enlightened, and Nick does his very best to keep his private behavior out of view.

The pressure and fizz of all this social collusion makes Beauty an intoxicating read. Nothing escapes Hollinghurst's awareness, especially when it occurs inside Nick's head. When the Feddens return from their country home in France, Nick is briefly lulled into believing he's a part of their family. Hollinghurst writes: "Their return marked the end of his custodianship, and his real pleasure in seeing them again was stained with a kind of sadness he associated with adolescence, sadness of time flying and missed opportunities. He was keen for a word of gratitude to ease the mysterious ache."

But he is not one of the Fedden family. As Nick evolves from a virgin naïf to a coke-addled party boy with a millionaire Lebanese boyfriend, Beauty becomes less a study in class than in how those on the margins of Thatcherite London were tainted by that period's ecstatic vacuity. (Indeed, Nick even finds himself dancing at a party with Maggie herself.)

Without stooping to caricature, Beauty recalls Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh's scurrilous satire of frantic party people oblivious to the gathering storm clouds of World War II. While Waugh had wars as his bookends, Hollinghurst has elections. Both are observed from the perspective of outsiders at first overcome by, then disgusted with, the glamorous society to which they're given entrée.

Throughout, Nick remains obsessed with style, beauty, and fabulous sex. It takes a delicate hand to poke fun at such fetishization while being (genuinely) stylish as a writer, but Hollinghurst pulls it off. Each sentence rings as perfect and true as a Schubert sonata. But Hollinghurst isn't jeering at his protagonist or belittling an inferior aesthetic. Even as Beauty dives toward its crushing finale, and AIDS puts an end to Nick's impetuous sexuality, Hollinghurst retains a wincing affection for his protagonist. Nick is simply caught up in a moment larger than himself and reaches for beauty as one does a life buoy. Over the course of this beautiful and very funny novel, Nick learns how that instinct can also lead to drowning. JOHN FREEMAN

Get Your War On II
By David Rees (Riverhead, $12)

A cursory scan of the funny pages yields exactly one comic strip with a snarling antiwar conscience: Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks. Yet a cursory scan of the Boondocks canon yields exactly no characters who ponder the following: "Fuckin' Freedom Fries??? OK, I have a question—is the War on Terrorism over? Because I sure as hell want to know that ALL THE TERRORISTS IN THE WORLD HAVE BEEN CAPTURED before legislators actually take the time to rename their GODDAMN CAFETERIA FOOD!"

Such is the withering id of David Rees, the raconteur behind clip-art cult classics My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable and My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable. As uproarious and groundbreaking as those minimalist collections are, it's obvious why his Get Your War On series of comic strips— often reprinted in the suddenly revitalized Rolling Stone—will go down as his legacy. Although profane bluster is their stock in trade, Rees' interchangeable office-drone facsimiles occasionally drop their ironic facades and eloquently voice real-world fears about America's increasingly hypocritical and grotesque foreign-policy rhetoric.

Dating from late September of 2002 to early July of this year, GYWO II satirizes every Middle East misstep from the onset of "Operation: Enduring Our Freedom to Bomb the Living Fuck Out of You" to the Ahmad Chalabi/Judith Miller scandal in which The New York Times "bravely chose to believe in Iraqi intelligence when others didn't have the courage to dream." The strip is light on topical exposition, heavy on sardonic, abstract analysis. North Korea is visually represented by an exuberant CEO sporting the country's geographic outline as its head, and Rees slyly introduces a few incompetently sketched and plotted GYWOs as a damning parallel to Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the Iraqi conflict. As usual, all of the book's profits will be donated to Afghan land mine relief; for all his foul-mouthed fatalism, Rees is more difference maker than Dilbert clone. ANDREW BONAZELLI

What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
By Thomas Frank (Metropolitan, $24)