Though it is too early to judge the significance of Alan Hollinghurst's contribution to English literature or to the more specialized field of gay literature, he has experienced both extravagant praise and impatient dismissal in sufficient measures to keep the debate lively. Both the praise and the dismissal tend to stem from approximately the same features. Critics have applauded the surgical precision of his language, his ability to survey whole landscapes or summarize complex perversities in little more than a phrase. Those who admire Hollinghurst's fiction note the honesty of his portrayal of certain kinds of homosexual relationships as well as of a society that, until the advent of AIDS, saw no particular reason not to refrain from promiscuity. One appreciates furthermore the breathless, enclosed quality of Hollinghurst's fictional environments—reminiscent of the walled garden of medieval allegory—which contain all that is gay and exclude, or admit...