The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst

I actually picked this book up a couple of years ago and couldn't get past the first few pages, but I decided to give it another go, since I loved The Stranger's Child so much. I've never read a book that's so simultaneously filthy and terribly clever. It was a really hard read for me because I found it very hard to connect with it emotionally. I felt totally desensitized by the extremely graphic descriptions of sex, and couldn't really engage emotionally because I had sort of distanced myself. But this is a problem with me as a reader, not with the book, which is really very good. I was also bewildered by the main character's seemingly utterly insatiable sexual appetite. And I didn't realise until about three fourths of the way through the book that it takes place in 1983, so every time people were having sex, my mind was screaming 'why are you not using protection?!?!' since I didn't realise that it took place before the AIDS epidemic. I was also quite uncomfortable with descriptions of random hookups and spontaneous sex between strangers, because I can't understand why people do that. So even though I found the main character often sympathetic, I spent a lot of the book thinking 'what are you doing and why??' There were some parts that had me absolutely crying with laughter and cringing at the same time, for example, when describing the showers in a gay sports club, the narrators talks about how 'in a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine'. I mean, what am image!! But most of the book was quite sad and extremely thought-provoking. It would probably take a 5000+ word essay just to start discussing all the deep, important, etc themes of this book, so I won't do it here, but it deals a lot with the shifting experiences of homosexuality in England throughout the 20th century, the patterns of persecution, secrecy and exploitation repeating through the years.