Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Alan Hollinghurst, who is the author most recently

of the Line of Beauty, published by Bloomsbury Books.

He's the author as well in order of the swimming pool library, the folding star, the spell.

The line of beauty is largely concerned with the doings of a young man named Nick Gast

who discovers really fairly early on that it's his fate to be a guest,

essentially, in the lives of others.

And as such, he sort of resembles the hero of a story by Henry James,

who is in fact the hero of young Nick, the hero of the beast in the jungle,

who discovers that his future is to have no future at all, that this is the distinguished thing for which he's been destined.

What attracted you to this kind of hero?

Well, he is, of course, very young throughout the novel.

He's 20 when it opens and he's 24 when it closes.

A lot of the book is about the lives of a group of young people

who have just left university and about great changes,

which happened to them nonetheless.

I was attracted to the idea of an outsider sort of magnetised by a world which he finds glamorous, fascinating but knows a little about.

...