SOURCE: "In the Onegin Line," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4344, July 4, 1986, p. 733.

Hollinghurst is an English novelist, editor, and critic. In the following review, he praises The Golden Gate for its technical virtuosity but complains that the form lacks the subtlety of prose.

The Pushkin stanza is a wonderfully self-renewing form. Fourteen lines long, it gathers together two kinds of quatrain and three couplets into tight units which are none the less full of movement and contrast, fleeter and less architectonic than sonnets, the closure of the quatrains offset by the forward-moving couplets at the centre, and brought to epigrammatic poise by the couplet at the end. It is a form whose inner counterpoint gives it both gravity and levity, and it is hard to imagine a better vehicle for social verse narrative which aims to be both reflective and lightly comic. Its small but perceptible vogue...