“Nick was always a favourite with mothers, he was known to be a nice young man, and he liked the unthreatening company of older people. He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity. But he also knew the state of suspense, the faked insouciance, of bringing friends home, the playful vigilance with which certain subjects had to be headed off even before they had arisen; you took only a distracted, irrelevant part in the conversation because you were thirty seconds, a minute, ten minutes ahead of it, detecting those magnetic embarrassments towards which it would always twitch and bend.”

Unpopular opinion here: I don’t get the deal with 80s music. Too synth-y, I think. But what a decade to think about in terms of its impact on our culture even all these years later. The partying! The drugs! The neon and spandex! The Gordon Gekko of it all! And then, underneath the flash, all the dark stuff: the rise of AIDS, the failure of trickle-down economics, the existential threat of nuclear war. On the whole, I’m glad I was born in the middle of that decade and grew up through the 90s and early 2000s. There were plenty of issues, but things were generally a little calmer overall.

It wasn’t just in America in the 1980s that conservatism had a moment: we had Reagan, and the United Kingdom had Margaret Thatcher. The Thatcher era is explored in Alan Hollingsworth’s The Line of Beauty through the eyes of Nick Guest, who has just graduated from Oxford and is halfheartedly pursuing post-graduate work on Henry James while he lives with the family of his classmate Toby Fedden. Nick, who is both middle-class and gay, is infatuated not just with Toby but with his whole life: the exclusive London neighborhood where he lives, his rich mother, his rising-star politician father, the blue-blooded social circles he runs in. Toby’s sister Catherine has a history of self-harm, so Nick stays with her in their home while the rest of the family takes their traditional summer trip to France, and there he has his first brief love affair with a man named Leo, who he meets through the personal ads.

A few years later, Nick’s studies are all but abandoned and he’s still living with the Feddens. He’s in a new relationship, with his one-time Oxford classmate Wani, whose family is from Lebanon. They have to keep things quiet, because while everyone knows Nick is gay, Wadi is deeply closeted. He’s also fabulously wealthy, and he and Nick start a magazine, Ogee (named after the shape), to give them an excuse to travel together. It’s peak 1980s and the couple is living it up: they’re far from exclusive and do quite a lot of cocaine. Nick even dances with Margaret Thatcher while high out of his mind. But being set when it is, the specter of AIDS becomes all too real. And a discovery Nick makes about the Fedden marriage makes his place in their world suddenly tenuous.

For a book that runs 500 pages, it’s paced well and moves surprisingly quickly. It’s helped by the fact that it’s organized into three sections with a couple of significant time jumps, which lets it focus on the good stuff. And there’s a lot of good stuff here: Hollingsworth’s story is beautifully written, thematically rich, and entertaining. There’s so much here about deception, hiding behind the surfaces of things. British society (as I, an American, understand it) is often inclined towards an appearance of calm even during real turmoil, but this is next level: Nick hides his middle-class origins through association with the Feddens, both Leo and Wani hide their sexuality from their conservative immigrant parents, one of the Fedden parents is hiding a secret (or two). And all of it is being hidden from greater world by that most powerful illusion: money.

The power of money, and the way it allows those who hold it to retreat away from consequences, is one point at which this book feels like it pays homage to The Great Gatsby. Another is having its young man with a middle-class point of view as a character named Nick. This Nick, like Gatsby‘s, is a bit of an elusive character, serving as much as an entry point into a gilded world for the reader as a clearly defined person in his own right. Beauty‘s Nick is more complicit, more dazzled by wealth and eager to truly belong among the rich. His disillusionment and expulsion is uglier, and more final. Even without the parallels to Gatsby (one of my personal all-time favorites), this is a fascinating look at both the beginning of the AIDS crisis and the excesses of the Thatcher era. There’s some sexy bits, but honestly not too many and not gratuitously racy…older teens are likely mature enough for it if they wanted to pick it up. It’s a really well-constructed book that I found enjoyable to read, and I’d definitely recommend it!