Hollinghurst’s vivid depiction of Wani’s physical beauty, including “the dark curly hair” (68), “the cruel charming curve of his lips” (81), and his “extraordinary eyelashes” (165), spoiled by his love of cocaine (“gleaming mucus, flecked with blood and undissolved powder, trailed out of his famous nose” ), causes one commentator to feel nothing but “incredulous revulsion” (Ridgeway) toward him. Summarized as “a closeted and cokehead Lebanese millionaire” (Hitchings), Wani exemplifies the “figure of novel beauty” (159) depraved by wealth, sex, and power: three interlocking factors obsessing Thatcher’s London. Wani’s characterization has been an easy target for moralistic judgment by reviewers.

The ethical dimension of Hollinghurst’s novel is largely revealed by what I would call the “post-moral” reading practice this novel urges on the reader in considering its morally problematic characters: the passive and uncritical Nick and his lover, the glamorous but wanton Antoine “Wani” Ouradi. Although no major act of betrayal occurs in the novel, Hollinghurst’s unsparing portrayal of beauty entwined with the money, drugs, politics, and AIDS of the Thatcherite eighties portends a deep sense of betrayal felt by Nick and a curious ethical possibility arising from it. As Nick moves from Oxford University into the posh Notting Hill residence of the Feddens as a lodger, “guest,” and children’s friend, he ecstatically enters into the mixed pleasures and dangers that beautiful things involve, from sumptuous upper-class parties to vulgar yet pleasurable postmodern art-commodities, from beautiful but corrupted people to the grim deaths of loved ones from AIDS. Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004) follows the varied aesthetic experiences of Nick Guest, a twenty-one-year-old “solemn little blond boy” (14) who “just love beautiful things” (6). 1 But when there exist so many different ways of understanding a single concept-beauty being the case in point-the beholder is likely to feel betrayed by it eventually.

Nor do I wish to choose one aesthetic discourse over another for legitimation.

Bourdieu’s sociological analysis of the class-bound concept of taste and Scarry’s philosophical meditation on beauty inspired by the Greek classics do not represent protean paradigms of aesthetics. Bourdieu’s and Scarry’s antinomic views on art and beauty, that is, what the love of beautiful things means to us, lead to the theme of this essay: bewilderingly various notions of beauty and the beholder feeling deceived by them.

The line of beauty novel