At the opening of Alan Hollinghurst’s fourth novel, its protagonist, the aptly named Nick Guest, has just taken up lodgings with the wealthy, powerful Feddens, parents of his Oxford chum Toby, whose Notting Hill house will provide a suitably grand base from which to begin his postgraduate work on style. He is interested in Conrad, Meredith and James and their “style that hides and reveals things at the same time” and, although we hear little more of his academic work (there’s not much time in between the sexual assignations, social mountaineering and ingestions of cocaine), its preoccupations steadily assert themselves as the novel’s own.

Beginning in 1983, shortly after the general election that sweeps the suavely ambitious Gerald Fedden into Westminster as MP for Nick’s provincial home constituency, The Line of Beauty dissects the decade’s contradictory instincts towards display and discretion. It is a stylistic crisis largely glimpsed through the ruling-class proprieties of the Feddens, with their attitude towards homosexuality (“vulgar and unsafe”), but also through Nick’s burgeoning sexual career, which begins in earnest with Leo, a working-class black man who flashes through the streets on a racing bike but remains firmly in the closet to his zealously religious mother.

Nick and Leo’s first, violently liberating physical contact, which comes to stand as a touchstone for authenticity, takes place in the dark, private gardens opposite the Fedden house, and thereafter Nick’s life is effectively split. He pursues sex with abandon, searching for the line of beauty that will become “a sort of animating principle”; but he also maintains a precarious, peculiar daylight persona. His role in the Fedden household is unclear, with a hint of the paid retainer (he is, in a superficially casual manner, charged with the care of Toby’s unstable sister, Catherine), the on-call aesthete and connoisseur who can discriminate nicely between recordings of Strauss and divine the importance of an escritoire, and the social enabler who can murmur reassurance, talk politely to the older generation and make up the numbers for dinner. His sexuality, like his solidly middle-class upbringing, is gracefully elided.

It appears, at first sight, that what Hollinghurst chooses to make from Nick’s social dislocation is a gentle satire, achieved largely through dialogue of toe-curling banality. The Feddens and their ilk communicate in “an idiom of tremendous agreement”, which leads to exchanges such as this discussion of Venice: “‘Fascinating!’ he said. ‘What a fascinating place.’ ‘I know . . . isn’t it fascinating,’ said Rachel. ‘Had you never been before?’ ‘Do you know, I’d never been before.’” When the man fascinated by Venice, a deliciously stupid young playboy whose Lebanese background puts him as beyond the pale as his extreme wealth rescues him from it, goes on to suggest that “the rococo is the final deliquescence of the baroque”, we know that erudition, scholarship, thought itself, have been set adrift in a world of acquisition and showmanship.

But as platitudes and conversational lubricants are batted back and forth, and as money and careers are made, Hollinghurst is edging slowly closer towards his novel’s darker themes. Aids, unknown to the hedonists of The Swimming-Pool Library, his first novel, which ends at the point where this tale begins, claims both Leo and Wani, the playboy, and delivers, perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the novel’s most tender moments. The passage in which Nick escorts a dying Wani home to his mother is one of the finest and most unshowy in a novel so exquisitely written that at times it feels almost as if it could dispense with plot and characters and exist on a plane of pure perception and connotation.

It doesn’t, of course, and it ably depicts the high-days of a boom society and the ambiguous charm of being both insider and cuckoo in the nest. But its delights and rewards extend beyond its comic or documentary achievements and are to be found in its author’s almost uncanny apprehension of the world he observes: an unwanted bottle of Lambrusco that lies in Gerald Fedden’s arms “as if tendered by a mocking sommelier”, Margaret Thatcher’s face seen as “a fine if improbable fusion of the Vorticist and the Baroque”. These are the lines of beauty that will last long beyond the surface shocks and excitements of the novel’s story.

THE LINE OF BEAUTY by Alan Hollinghurst

Picador £16.99 pp501

Available at the Books First price of £13.59 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy