MARCH 2018 - AudioFile
David Dawson is masterful with dialogue, and there can be no better qualification for the narrator of this vast and engrossing audiobook. The saga opens with a group of esthetes at Oxford in the 1940s discovering a beautiful new student called David Sparsholt. The esthetes are privileged, artists and intellectuals, members of a literary Memoir Club. Sparsholt is an engineer from a different class, waiting to join the RAF, and apparently as hetero as they come. Yet two generations later, the effete “Memo” crowd and the Sparsholts remain deeply intertwined. As always with Hollinghurst, the writing is stunning, and the pulse of the story is pervasively homoerotic. Dawson’s ear for personality, class, regional speech, and the accents of different periods is uncanny. An impressive performance. B.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
The Barnes & Noble Review
The Sparsholt Affair is Alan Hollinghurst's sixth novel, and like his previous two -- the Man Booker Prize–winning The Line of Beauty and, subsequently, The Stranger's Child -- the story travels through a series of eras, capturing in each the nature of gay life in England. That, at least, would be one way to describe these works: another would be to say that, like them, the present novel follows the repercussions and echoes of earlier deeds or events over time. Beyond that, the quality that stands out in Hollinghurst's novels, and here again, is the unstrained precision of his prose style, a justness and aptness of description that send happy jolts of recognition through the reader.
The story begins at Oxford in 1940, the second year of the war, and all is provisional. Buildings have been requisitioned, and students from various colleges have been thrown together. Many have already left to join the military. Some, like the narrator, Freddie Green, have been recruited for intelligence work. Freddie belongs to a group of friends who include Peter Coyle, a rather louche painter, and Evert Dax, a nascent art collector and the son of the novelist A. V. Dax, whose "unshakably serious" books are much admired though seldom enjoyed (their "nearest approaches to jokes were quotations from Erasmus and occasional mockery of the working classes"). Peter and Evert are gay and entranced by the sight, in a window across the way, of a beautiful being lifting weights. This, it turns out, is David Sparsholt, an engineering student who is about to sign up with the RAF -- and who goes on to be awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and, later, to found a successful engineering firm.
"Spar . . . sholt . . . Sounds like part of an engine, or a gun," Peter Coyle observes. And, indeed, Sparsholt is all efficiency and rather chilling practicality. Unlike his admirers, he leads an outward heterosexual life along with a closeted gay one, though, with respect to the latter, it seems that he may employ his beautiful body purely as a means to various ends unconnected -- or not entirely connected -- to desire. Although his name adorns the title, David Sparsholt, the man, is never really investigated. He is a cipher, a circumstance that is handily evoked by his coming from the industrial city of Nuneaton, which to Freddie has "something null about it," and, graphically, by a chalk drawing made by Peter Coyle of his torso: "a portrait of a demigod from neck to knee, the sex suggested by a little slur, conventional as a fig leaf, while the neck opened up to nothing, like the calyx of a flower."
The second part of the novel takes us forward to 1966 and is delivered from the point of view of David Sparsholt's thirteen-year- old son, Johnny. He is gay, timid, and dyslexic, but with the budding talent of the portrait artist he will become. When we meet him, he is in the thrall of an infatuation with a visiting French boy named Bastien, a heartless little monster of manipulation who comes on holiday to Cornwall with the Sparsholts and another family. The section ends with an intimation of the beginning of the notorious "Sparsholt Affair," a ruinous, salacious scandal that reverberates through the rest of the novel and turns on the fact that homosexual acts were still criminal offenses in England until 1967. There is a suggestion that the appalling Bastien might have had a hand in exposing the deeds that ended in Sparsholt's notoriety, but that is never followed up -- like so many things in this novel, which is one of lacunae.
Thus we move on to 1974. In Britain it is a dreary year of labor disputes, rolling power cuts, and the "Three-day week." Johnny is working for Evert Dax, now a writer and part of a bohemian coterie, and through this association he becomes friends with two lesbians, to whom he eventually donates sperm. The resulting child, Lucy, shows up in the next section, set in 1982, and from there we are brought to 1995 and finally 2012. Hollinghurst's evocation of different eras and of how gay life is lived in each is deftly portrayed; and each section evolves into a substory of what we may loosely call the plot. But therein lies cause for disappointment, for each developing narrative is abruptly cut off once -- it truly seems -- we have become thoroughly engaged with it. We find ourselves plunged into the next era to find predicaments dissolved and a whole new set of circumstances reigning. It is frustrating, all the more so as each section is so beautifully composed, so filled with fully formed characters, arresting images, and currents of surreptitious humor.
Hollinghurst has few equals in the exactness with which he summons up human traits, often with comic brio. This is especially so in the last part, which finds Johnny at sixty years of age in a milieu that prizes youth and a well-tended physique. He is at a gay nightclub, observing, amid the throng of young men, the few "bald and grizzled pillars of his own generation." He "was troubled by them for a second, and then as quickly grateful that some looked older than him." He heads off to the gents, elevated by Ecstasy:
In the mirror as he queued he saw himself, astonished wide-eyed figure, pink-faced, grey thatch rustic among the sharp cuts and shaven heads of the young people sliding and barging past him, but there was nothing he could do about it now and giving himself a sexy smile which got an 'All right?' from the friendly Chinese boy pressing in beside him, he went to a place at the trough. A few minutes later he set off again at a strange wading stagger to find his friends.
As with so many passages in this novel, everything is perfect here: the scene, the visual truth, the pacing, the mood, and, not least, the author's kindly touch. It very nearly makes up for our being wrenched out of story after story.
Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963. Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
That Hollinghurst is gay is not the least interesting thing about him. Few writers have so expanded and altered our perceptions of male beauty. His magic, though, is in his gifts, which can resemble Henry James's, as a social novelist…When Hollinghurst picks up an aspect of human experience, however banal—riding a bus, sitting for a portrait, being on a sailboat—he is so exacting that it's as if no one has described these things before…Hollinghurst is a cerebral sensualist. His characters work themselves into each other's hearts and minds as devotedly as they work themselves into each other's underpants. In her (excellent) recent book of diaries, Tina Brown wrote about journalists that while you can teach them things like structure, you cannot teach the most important thing of all, which is "how to notice the right things." Hollinghurst remains one of the great noticers.
The New York Times Book Review - Adam Kirsch
Readers of [The Stranger's Child]—or of Hollinghurst's earlier The Line of Beauty…will find much that is familiar here, stylistically and thematically. As always, Hollinghurst writes classically beautiful prose, which…is constantly intelligent, alert and mobile…As the story moves forward in time, Hollinghurst achieves the kind of symphonic effect we normally associate with much longer books, like Proust's In Search of Lost Time or Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. People we first met as students in the 1940s return in new guises: A writer is famous, then forgotten, then the subject of scholarly revival; the teenage David turns into a father, then a grandfather. The effect is moving, and Hollinghurst writes with a wisdom and understanding only available to an experienced writer working with his favorite themes. By the end of the novel, the mystery of David Sparsholt hasn't quite been solved, but it has served its purpose—as the absent center of a beautiful and complex design.
Publishers Weekly
★ 11/20/2017
A gay man’s search for love and artistic expression is at the center of Booker Prize–winner Hollinghurst’s masterful sixth novel, written in elegant, captivating prose. Here, he shines a clarifying light on the gay and art worlds (often synonymous) through decades of British cultural and political change. The story sweeps along in five interlinked sections, in which the characters move through different stages of their lives and their country’s history. Some of the characters are first observed at Oxford as they wait to be called up for military service during the tense early days of WWII. Stunningly handsome David Sparsholt draws the attention of a group of friends, literary aesthetes who observe him with interest and, in some cases, with lust. Two decades later, David is a war hero, married and the father of a son, Johnny, who will be central to the remainder of the novel. Readers gradually learn about the homosexual scandal that brought David national attention and a prison term in the ’60s. David would like to disown his past; Johnny is an uncloseted gay man in a changed society in which homosexuality is no longer a crime. In 1970s London, Johnny, beginning his career as a painter, enters the milieu of some of his father’s former Oxford friends. In the last section, set in the present day, Hollinghurst makes explicit reference to “time, loss and change,” and celebrates Johnny’s erotic passion and the emotional haven of domestic companionship. In this magnificent novel, Hollinghurst is at the height of his powers. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Call Me By Your Name meets Evelyn Waugh in a gorgeous novel about the generations-long aftershocks of a youthful tryst.” —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
“Beautiful; moving . . . A complex saga that takes us, in long leaps, from the Blitz to the age of smartphones. Hollinghurst writes classically beautiful prose: constantly intelligent, alert and mobile. Hollinghurst achieves [a] symphonic effect . . . he writes with subtlety and sympathy; wisdom and understanding.” —Adam Kirsch, The New York Times Book Review
“Alluring, virtuosic, cinematic. . . Hollinghurst wonderfully conveys the charged atmosphere of ordinary life rumbling under extraordinary circumstances. The traditional novel form seems as pleasurable and humanly true as ever in his hands.” —Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
“Satisfying . . . At the heart of The Sparsholt Affair are volatile secrets that can never be riddled into the light.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Utterly captivating and immersive . . . Hollinghurst remains one of our most gifted writers, unspooling sentences as precise and lyrical, deft and ingenious, as any in the English language.” —Priscilla Gilman, Boston Globe
“Absorbing . . . displays a masterly grasp of psychological processes and a prickling awareness of minute betrayals and inarticulate desires. When Hollinghurst picks up an aspect of human experience, he is so exacting that it’s as if no one has described these things before.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Hollinghurst is a superb writer. Like Henry James, he writes prose so dense with lines of beauty that you can’t quite catch up to them in real time, lines that are razor close to human experience and yet — or therefore — retain a continual capacity for surprise. In The Sparsholt Affair, he has made it his project to describe the agonizingly long time it took for gay life to reach its present state of encumbered but unprecedented freedom . . . [The novel is] sad in the clear-eyed lonely fashion of Philip Larkin. Undeniably the work of a master. . . There’s nothing Hollinghurst could write that I wouldn’t read.” —Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune
“Fascinating, magisterial . . . It captures the nuanced textures of life. Hollinghurst is a literary master.” —John Powers, “Fresh Air,” NPR
“Epic, elegant, intricately constructed. An overarching theme of The Sparsholt Affair is the quest for love. Chance, temptation, time, loss, and change mark the decades; Hollinghurst builds an intricate web of relationships with stately, Jamesian precision and nuance. . . Moving, heartfelt—no novelist has chronicled [the] salubrious sea change in cultural attitudes [toward homosexuality] more beautifully than Hollinghurst. His exquisite prose rewards close attention.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR
“Powerful, thrilling . . . The Sparsholt Affair is a work of characteristic subtlety and forthrightness. Hollinghurst is a writer for whom sex and fine art, sensual and aesthetic bliss, are not discrete activities, but points along a spectrum of delight.” —Giles Harvey, The New York Times Magazine
“A multigenerational tapestry, ingeniously constructed and delicately written; so achingly powerful, you’ll savor every page.” —Lauren Morgan, Entertainment Weekly
“A secret history of art and desire—and its effect on an iconoclastic English family—is at the heart of a novel shaped by the keen understanding of how we live and the repercussions of the previous generation’s actions.” —Megan O’Grady, Vogue
“A deeply pleasurable riffing on the repressed English novel—Forster, James, Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Austen—written with poise, lucidity, and pathos. A gay love story doesn’t have to be about thwarted longing anymore; in Hollinghurst’s hands, the traditional obstacles to romance—age, upbringing, inclination, society’s expectations—become sparks and, at length, a full-blown liberatory force blasting through the divisions in British society. Sex, he shows, can be about friendship and self-discovery, power, distraction, and comfort, among many other things. But love—well, love is rare. What Hollinghurst is hinting . . . [is] a desire to forget time, or, more accurately, to forget that our time is limited. . . . Beautiful.” —Joanna Biggs, Harper’s
“A study of how a single sensational event reverberates across the decades . . . Hollinghurst’s mellifluous prose is as fine and subtly shaded as ever, and his full, persuasive immersion of the reader in the book’s far-flung eras is impeccable. The Sparsholt Affair has a rich symphonic sweep as it makes its points and counterpoints.” —Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
“A wonder, full of wit and tenderness—a lusciously observant dive into 20th-century English life. The novel charts the great changes in gay life in Britain over the course of a lifetime. It also betrays a whiff of nostalgia—[and is] a memorial to a way of life that has vanished. There is no better stylist alive [than] Hollinghurst.” —Laura Miller, Slate
“Gorgeous . . . To read Alan Hollinghurst is to encounter beauty in its many forms. There’s the beauty of the sentences—Jamesian, somehow intensely shaped and effortlessly supple. There are beautiful characters…beautiful houses, beautiful paintings, beautiful poems. Hollinghurst is a wicked satirist and a delicious plotter, but I most admire the seriousness with which he takes beauty—its relationship to pleasure and power, secrecy and love. David Sparsholt and his beauty serve as the plot’s engine—the Chekhovian gun that you know will go off. And it does. [There is] sharp insight about time and loss, sharply expressed.” —Anthony Domestico, San Francisco Chronicle.
“Hollinghurst is clearly writing some of the most beautiful lines currently to be found in English.” —Emily Gould, Bookforum
"I had the distinct sense, on finishing Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel, that I might have read next year’s Booker-winner before this year’s had even been announced. The Sparsholt Affair is a sweeping and intimate masterpiece, full of sensual pleasures and observational wisdom." —Geoff Dyer
“Extraordinary . . . The joy and pain of The Sparsholt Affair is in revealing the locking and unlocking of secrets across generations. The joy Hollinghurst takes in life’s small shards of beauty…feel[s] like the joy of life itself—when Johnny and his French friend play in the sea as teenagers, the unpremeditated elation of their bodies is like a series of arrows into the heart. Hollinghurst’s oeuvre acts like a bridge for culture. As the realization dawns [that] Hollinghurst is on the side of life, the walls start to come down. Time passes and people die. The instants of pure splendor are what make life livable, make it writable. The Sparsholt Affair affirms them, again.” —Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic
“Dazzling . . . Several minor Sparsholt affairs glow around the scandal of the novel’s title; the [one] named in the title involves a minister of Parliament, political corruption, and a tryst between two businessmen friends. Rendered [with] consistently astonishing refinement.” —Christian Lorentzen, Vulture
“Beautiful, potent . . . rich with the kind of emotional detail that marks Hollinghurst’s best work.” —Mark Athitakis, Newsday
“A beautifully drawn portrayal of families (both given and chosen), memory, and the compromises that can make up a life.” —Adam Rathe, Town & Country Magazine
“An Alan Hollinghurst novel comes into the world with a whole heart. There’s so much honest living going on in his pages—desires, needs, regrets, sex, worries, beauty, ugliness, anxiety, humor: Hollinghurst is arguably the finest coiner of character at work today. Attention to sound and imagery can be found in every one of his famously gorgeous sentences. [But] if he’s a descendent of Henry James and Forster, he’s also one of Jean Genet and Edmund White. In The Sparsholt Affair, Hollinghurst takes aim at nearly a century of gay life in Britain, beginning in Oxford just after the start of WWII, and ending in the present, in a gay universe of dating apps and raising children. Hollinghurst writes some of his best lines about love, loss and memory in this novel.” —Christopher Bollen, Interview Magazine
“Cool is fine; Hollinghurst is great. Here as in his earlier works, the writer is interested in upper-crusty Oxbridge chaps making their way in society, getting entangled in art, in politics, and in bed (or a men’s room, or a sauna, or a nightclub) with one another. Sex, pleasure, and beauty are fundamental to human life; Hollinghurst is uninterested in an existence that doesn’t celebrate the three. Reading the author’s beautiful sentences on the matter, you can be persuaded that sex, too, is an art form.” —Rumaan Alam, 4Columns
“Tantalizing . . . The novel's primal scene is the glimpse, by Oxford students during the prescribed blackouts of the WWII blitz, of a transfixing nude male torso in a room across the quad. Hollinghurst’s style [is] sophisticated, with a diamond-cutter's feel for what qualifies as an edge . . . While his characters are averting their eyes, Hollinghurst sculpts their exact shapes. He sustains his subterranean human comedy with wickedly Wildean compassion; you neither put the book down nor reach for a single stone to throw at anyone.” —Tim Pfaff, Bay Area Reporter
“Brilliant . . . Evoked with confident richness: a seven-decade multi-generational chronicle of elite English gay life . . . Hollinghurst [holds a] commanding position, only strengthened by his latest novel, as a very contemporary English writer deeply formed by the tradition.” —Randy Boyagoda, National Review
“A big, bold, brassy, spectacular saga of the tectonic shifts in gay lives in Britain from 1940 to 2012. . . an exuberant, highly entertaining excursion into many lives over many years.” —Robert Allen Papinchak, The National Book Review
★ “Masterful—written in elegant, captivating prose. The story sweeps along in five interlinked sections, in which the characters move through different stages of their lives and their country’s history. Hollinghurst shines a clarifying light on the gay and art worlds through decades of British cultural and political change. In this magnificent novel, Hollinghurst is at the height of his powers.” —Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)
★ “Thrilling; fascinating . . . a novel full of life and perception. A man’s inability to be honest about his sexuality has scandalous, and brutally public, consequences for several generations. Hollinghurst tracks the vast, transformative changes in gay life over many decades. Part of Hollinghurst's bold talent in this novel, as in his previous work, is to make it evident that lust, sex, and who does what with whom in the bedroom (and even how) are fitting, and insightful, subjects of literary fiction.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“The Jamesian elegance and psychological acuity of Hollinghurst’s previous novels grace The Sparsholt Affair, a multigenerational saga focusing on the Sparsholts and the effect a highly public midcentury scandal has on their family and legacy. This is a moving work from one of modern literature’s finest authors.” —Michael Magras, BookPage
★ “Hollinghurst’s sprawling novel, suffused with lust and longing, movingly portrays the generational shift in gay experience and acceptance. Warmly recommended.”—Library Journal (starred review)
★ “Superlatives are made to describe this extraordinary work of fiction. Distinguished . . . a novel notable for its sophistication. The world of art and literature and the evolving world of gay society and culture in Britain [are] brilliantly realized. Hollinghurst is especially good at evoking yearning, and, indeed, his novel will inarguably leave his readers yearning for more.” —Michael Cart, Booklist (starred review)
Reviews from the U.K.
“Perhaps Hollinghurst’s most beautiful novel yet—a book full of glorious sentences by the greatest prose stylist writing in English today. The Sparsholt Affair is about gay life, about art, about family, but most of all it’s about the remorseless passage of time. There’s always something elegiac about the movement of time in a Hollinghurst novel; there’s an inevitable feeling of sorrow that comes with the end of each section. [Yet] The Sparsholt Affair is funnier and mre warm-hearted than any of his books so far. Hollinghurst is wonderful on the ‘beautiful delay’ of university life, on the cloisters and the quadrangles, tentative intimacies building between friends and lovers: he can do an Oxford novel as well as Waugh. An unashamedly readable novel, undoubtedly the work of a master.” —Alex Preston, The Observer
“This book moves from strength to strength. The immense assurance of the writing, the deep knowledge of the settings and periods in which the story unfolds, the mingling of cruel humour and lyrical tenderness, the insatiable interest in human desire from its most refined to its most brutally carnal, grip you as tightly as any thriller. Hollinghurst layers situations that cumulatively portray a culture as it exists in time as well as in space: a constellation of longings and confusions. The novel keeps pulsing: an amazing amount of the passion and folly of the human comedy is woven in, all of it beautifully observed and memorably articulated.” —James Lasdun, The Guardian “
A novelist with a particular genius for inhabiting the past [and] an extraordinary gift for the condensing and enriching detail . . . Hollinghurst can give a tiny history of the high street and a thumbnail sketch of a life-story all in a few dozen words. His evocation of Oxford in wartime is ravishing in its detail, [and] it isn’t only the overtly gorgeous passages that shine . . . Ordinary actions are ushered from one sort of life into another, carried tenderly across in language that is unhurried and precise. [Hollinghurst’s writing] evokes Whistler’s brushwork, Henry James’s prose or Frank Lloyd Wright’s way with a building, but does not recognize a separation between high and low, past and present, glory and disgrace. With an astonishing responsiveness to light, sound, painting, the past, social nuance, music, sensation, buildings inside and out, the inner life of sentence, he is saturated in the literary past but unhindered by it.” —Adam Mars-Jones, The London Review of Books
"Dazzlingly good: the best new novel I’ve read this year. Once again, Hollinghurst is both utterly sumptuous and utterly precise. Perfect scene follows perfect scene; no object in The Sparsholt Affair is too unimportant to receive his full and thrilling attention. Combining broad sweep with plenty of equally impressive close-up analysis, Hollinghurst plunges us into haute bohemia over several decades. He reminds us that yet another of his lavish gifts is for rueful comedy. Hollinghurst is as deft as ever." —James Walton, The Spectator
“Hollinghurst’s novels remind you of the deep pleasures of reading novels. Such is the penetrating clarity of his perception, his ability to convey many layers of experience at once. The Sparsholt Affair is likely to provoke that same flutter of recognition in readers. It’s the story of what happens before and after a sexual-political scandal, and about the lives colored by the affair… Around every episode there’s a thick membrane of social detail. The reflection and refraction of history in this book is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s family saga The Years. The Sparsholt Affair is wider in scope [and] more tender than anything Hollinghurst has written before.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr, London Evening Standard
“This is not your usual page-turner: it is a meticulously written, acutely insightful novel about human (mis)behavior, about time and unremitting change, with a skein of skillfully entwined what-happens-next? stories ranging over three generations. The felicities of the prose are unceasing: the observations and apercus are impeccably judged. Hollinghurst can be rigorously analytical one moment, slyly comic the next, erotic, then nostalgic, and subtle. He has his characters to a tee; the humour can ambush us. More movingly, a situation of multiple accumulations can be rendered by a single gesture—and a casual flick of the authorial eye. It would be hard, impossible, to over-praise this novel.” —Ronald Frame, The Sunday Herald (Glasgow)
“Audacious, ambitious . . . an absorbingly complex novel reaching across seven decades, with a sense of lost time in the gaps it leaves. The narrative [is] alert to implicit meanings; Hollinghurst’s achievement is to make those meanings the stuff of all social exchanges. His sentences trust in our intelligence while doing justice to the unknowability of other people. Hollinghurst’s prose delights.” —John Mullan, The Times (Saturday Review)
“A multi-part story of a family plunged into scandal that is likely to delight fans of The Line of Beauty.” —Alice Jones, Top Picks in The Independent
“Without a doubt, both a highlight of Hollinghurst’s career, and one of the best books of the year. The novel charts the course of three generations of Sparsholts. Hollinghurst moves between times, places, and perspectives with the ease of a true master, any regret I felt at leaving each behind immediately mitigated by the majestic welcome of the next.” —Lucy Scholes, The Independent
“Atmospheric. . . richly textured and alive with ironic wit. The Sparsholt Affair chronicles shifting social, cultural and sexual attitudes over eight decades, tracing twists brought about by the passing years across a broad canvas. Hollinghurst’s alertness to tone and body language is acute. Urbanely satiric scenes entertainingly unroll; suave impalings of vanity are a specialty. An ambitious novel of family, sexuality and art.” —Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times (UK)
“Masterly, evocative—a portrait of life in the UK before and since the decriminalization of homosexuality [from] one of our finest novelists. . . Hollinghurst’s return with a new novel could hardly be better timed. The Sparsholt Affair exposes closeted gay lives of the past, and out gay lives of the present, culminating in a breathtaking description of a night of drugs and dancing in a gay club: a passage that grabs the reader by the sweaty palm and pulls him or her, elated, through the swirling debauch. The novel delineates, with leaps in time and place, shifting tastes in art and culture and social behaviors, changing attitudes to sex and relationships—and to class. As with all Hollinghurst’s work, it is utterly involving, uncannily realized, beautifully written, and very moving.” —Alex Bilmes, Esquire
“Hollinghurst is rightly regarded as one of Britain’s finest observers of life. If Jane Austen’s novels were about marriage eligibility, then a Hollinghurstian theme is about another sort of coupling. [Yet] Austen would recognise his characters, many of whom are posh, privileged, well-educated. From Oxford in 1940 into our age, The Sparsholt Affair captures the changing nature of the homosexual experience as the country moves from shame and criminality to openness [and] dating apps; the most moving parts of the novel are about a man, whose long-term partner has died, being thrust into the [dating] market again, which has been transformed by the internet.” —Robbie Millen, The Times (UK)
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2017-12-10
A man's inability to be honest about his sexuality has scandalous, and brutally public, consequences for several generations.At the outset of this novel, in 1940, all the gay men and at least one straight woman in a literary club at Oxford are infatuated with beautiful David Sparsholt, a first-year engineering student who initially seems oblivious to the attention. One student, Evert Dax, the son of famous, inexplicably bestselling novelist A.V. Dax, is determined to bed Sparsholt. (Ostensibly straight Freddie Green, whose memoir about his years at Oxford makes up the first section of the novel, claims Sparsholt has a "dull square face.") Sparsholt's straight bona fides (he has a girlfriend) soon come into thrilling question. The students watch warily at night for German bombs in the World War II-era opening of the novel, which soon transitions to 1966, when Sparsholt's 14-year-old son, Johnny, lusts after Bastien, a French exchange student who's living with his family. Johnny is the heart of the story, and in the ensuing sections taking place over many decades he gives Hollinghurst the opportunity to track the vast, transformative changes in gay life since David Sparsholt attended Oxford. Johnny is a fascinating character: a painter who is sensitive, proudly bohemian, sometimes rejected in love, and still eager for love at an advanced age, but always calmly aware of who he is and the dangers of trying to be someone else. It's a lesson he learned from his father's arrogant belief that he could skirt the restrictive, heterosexual mores of pre-sexual liberation England. If this plot sounds like it couldn't possibly have been the work of a Man Booker Prize-winning author, part of Hollinghurt's (The Stranger's Child, 2011, etc.) bold talent in this novel, as in his previous work, is to make it evident that lust, sex, and who does what with whom in the bedroom (and even how) are fitting, and insightful, subjects of literary fiction.A novel full of life and perception; you end the book not minding that the actual Sparsholt affair gets just the barest of outlines.
