The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Man Booker Prize, a sweeping new novel that explores richly complex relationships between fathers and sons as it spans seven transformative decades in England, from the 1940s through the present.

David Sparsholt is a man who commands attention. As a student at Oxford during the early days of World War II, he's handsome, powerful and alluring to all who meet him--both women and men. His two closest friends, Evert and Freddie, are aspiring artists who are quickly drawn into Sparsholt's magnetic field even as the mores of the day complicate their ambitions--aesthetic, romantic and otherwise.
Twenty years later, all three men find themselves in unexpected positions--sometimes rewarded, but sometimes thwarted--vis-a-vis love and career; money and stature. David Sparsholt is now married with a wife and son, having claimed fame as a fighter pilot in the war, but also infamy after a scandalous affair rocked his entire family--especially his teenage son, Johnny. It's the 1960s, and upheavals of all sorts are rampant in England and around the world, including as we follow Johnny's struggles to untangle his own private web of identity, art and sexuality. Together, these men's trials and triumphs present a complicated portrait of masculinity and artistic worth in England's upper echelons, where one's name carries the legacy, but also the telling scars, of the generations before him.
Engaging, atmospheric, told in lush and gorgeous prose, The Sparsholt Affair is a brilliant novel about sensuality and scruples set against a backdrop of radical social change, from a writer whose work is as provocative as it is precisely rendered.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Gay, Historical, Literary Fiction

432 pages, Hardcover

First published October 5, 2017

About the author

Alan Hollinghurst is an English novelist, and winner of the 2004 Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty.

He read English at Magdalen College, Oxford graduating in 1975; and subsequently took the further degree of Master of Literature (1979). While at Oxford he shared a house with Andrew Motion, and was awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1974, the year before Motion.

In the late 1970s he became a lecturer at Magdalen, and then at Somerville College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1981 he moved on to lecture at University College London. In 1997, he went on an Asia book tour in Singapore.

In 1981 he joined The Times Literary Supplement and was the paper's deputy editor from 1982 to 1995.

He lives in London.

Reviews

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Six years ago, I loved Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child; I leapt on The Sparsholt Affair as soon as it was published, not least because I thought it sounded rather similar. The story is split into five parts, spanning a period of about 70 years. It opens with a first-person account set during the Second World War, with a group of Oxford students lodging together after being evacuated from their colleges. Freddie Green, who narrates, is the nexus of a group that also includes Evert Dax, the gauche son of a somewhat famous author, and aspiring artist Peter Coyle. All are mutually fascinated by a new student, David Sparsholt, and both Evert and Peter are determined to seduce him.

In the second segment, David's son, Johnny, is 14 years old and grappling with his own sexuality. It's Johnny we follow for the next half-century, as he too is drawn into the orbit of Evert Dax et al. He unwittingly circles back to the encounters David had at Oxford, and must reconcile his perception of his father with what he discovers. In the first section, Freddie uses the phrase 'the Sparsholt affair' repeatedly to describe his friends' blatant desire for David; in part two, the affair is rather more literal; but what most people mean when they refer to it is a scandal involving Sparsholt senior. We're made aware this was something shocking enough to have been newsworthy, but the details remain murky for quite some time; indeed they are never fully elucidated.

The scandal – like many pivotal events in the book – happens off the page. The Sparsholt Affair is fragmented; the reader must work to put it all together. Characters speak in fragments, too. They misunderstand one another, or their sentences tail off. This fluid style may be true to life, but it can be difficult to interpret on the page, sometimes making for stilted and confusing reading. As I worked through the chapters, often with a stronger sense of duty than pleasure, it began to dawn on me that The Sparsholt Affair was much less like The Stranger's Child than I'd hoped. It lacks the scope and grandeur of its predecessor, there are few truly memorable scenes, and frankly, Johnny Sparsholt is just not a terribly interesting person.

The greatest strengths of The Sparsholt Affair lie half-hidden in its details: tiny moments and seemingly throwaway observations that capture experiences you might previously have supposed too infinitesimal to define. I enjoyed many small things about this book, and often marvelled at Hollinghurst's powers of description. But I'm afraid I found the bigger picture – the story as a whole – a bit of a drag.

TinyLetter | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr

[Issicratea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alan Hollinghurst makes you wait for his meticulously crafted novels, so they feel rather an occasion when they arrive. He has published six now, at elegantly spaced intervals, over the almost thirty years since his 1988 debut, The Swimming-Pool Library, with his 2004 Booker prize-winning The Line of Beauty the most famous (and, in my view, the best.)

The Sparsholt Affair has strong structural and thematic affinities with Hollinghurst’s previous novel, The Stranger's Child. Both span a long period of time across the twentieth century, ending more or less in the present day. Where The Stranger’s Child starts from just before the First World War, The Sparsholt Affair opens early in the Second, in the ghostly chiaroscuro of a wartime, blackout Oxford. Memory is a major theme of both novels—cultural and collective memory, personal and emotional recollection, and the intersection of the two.

Another theme in both these novels is art, and its making, and its afterlife: poetry and literature in The Stranger’s Child predominantly; the visual arts in The Sparsholt Affair. Most particularly, in The Sparsholt Affair, Hollinghurst is interested in the art of the portrait. The novel’s main character and focalizer, Johnny Sparsholt, is a portraitist; and scenes of him crafting images of friends and strangers punctuate the work and bring it to its end.

A strange, haunting, headless portrait also weaves its way throughout the novel, fulfilling a similar cross-temporal linking role as Cecil Valance’s poem, “Two Acres,” does in The Stranger’s Child: a red chalk drawing of the torso of Johnny’s father, David Sparsholt, as a young man at Oxford, by an artist whose incipient career is cut off almost immediately, as he is killed shortly afterwards in the war.

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 into nothing, like the calyx of a flower.

This oblique, frustrating work functions as a symbol of the sexual and psychological unknowability of the elder Sparsholt: an obscure object of desire both for the gay young aesthetes of wartime Oxford and, more tragically, for his son. David Sparsholt is, in a painful sense, public property. The “affair” of the title is a tabloid-worthy scandal he creates or is caught up in, and which his son can never escape, given their shared, unusual surname (a word like a machine part, as an early Oxford acquaintance muses, or a small hard sample, perhaps of some mineral ore.) Yet, for all his fame or infamy, Sparsholt senior remains a tantalizing blur in the novel (or perhaps I should say a slur, following Hollinghurst.) Poignantly, David is the sole person Johnny cannot capture in paint—although his son takes a subtle revenge by sketching him as he lies dead on his hospital bier.

Amid all the novel’s delicate aesthetic and philosophical meanderings, Hollinghurst also manages a history of gay identities and gay lives in Britain from the ‘40s, through the ‘70s to the ‘90s and beyond. His focus is mainly on male gay culture—the great, continuing theme and setting of his novels—although the ladies get a brief look-in here as well. There’s an emphasis throughout on cross-generational relationships (fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, age-gapped love relationships), which has the effect of binding the philosophical theme of memory very tightly into the emotional texture of the novel.

As you’ll have gathered, there is a lot to think about and talk about in The Sparsholt Affair. It’s literary-critical catnip, in its broad, thematic design; and the execution is just beautiful for the most part. Here’s a description of a Whistler view of the Thames, seen from an interior looking over the same river in the ‘70s, which also functions as a kind of mise en abyme self-portrait of Hollinghurst’s own descriptive writing.

Beyond the traffic, between the plane trees, lay the grey expanse of the river, the cold wellings and streakings of its currents. And on the other side, an odd ruinous nothing—which Whistler (when Johnny came back in and looked again) seemed already to have noted in the three brown brushstrokes whose mere accidents, the spread and flick of a loose hair, the ghost of a bubble, the sticky split second as the brush left the canvas, were also small miracles of observation, a wall, a roof, a chimney rising through mist.

So, why didn’t I love this novel, I ask myself, when I can think of so many complimentary things to say about it? I didn’t love The Stranger’s Child either; and I think it may have something to do with the high-risk strategy of cross-temporal, episodic narration. If you’re as good a writer as Hollinghurst, you risk writing a first episode so strong that you draw the reader in almost too much. The initial Edwardian episode is what remains in my mind most potently from The Stranger’s Child, at six years’ distance; and I suspect it may be the original Oxford episode—a first-person memoir by a minor character in the book—that stays with me most from The Sparsholt Affair. I was verging on irritated when I was abruptly bounced out of that twilit world, and into what I found, at least initially, a less compelling narrative. I’m not sure I ever fully engaged with Johnny as a character, amiable as he is, perhaps as a result of that first rift.

[Helle]

I have NOT read this new novel by Alan Hollinghurst yet - it only came out a few days ago - but if anyone has, I'd be grateful for a comment about it because PEOPLE: I'm due to ask AH himself a question on the phone this coming Monday! It's for BBC world book club and will air on British radio in November! Apparently they tracked down my review of his The Line of Beauty, and as Danes are in vogue in Britain, they picked me. Holy moly!

[Gerhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably the closest that Alan Hollinghurst will ever come to writing a Jamesian ‘comedy of manners’. Though I doubt very much Henry James would have dreamt of a scene featuring a character called Snapstud, “a naked young man wanking and staring at the camera while sliding a translucent blue dildo in and out of his arse.” The reaction of Johnny – and I suspect the reader – is “Good grief…!”

A lot has been made about Hollinghurst being some kind of a literary heir to Henry James. I cannot honestly figure out why. Is it because both like really long sentences? A side-effect of the Jamesian comparison is that Hollinghurst is portrayed automatically as a literary – i.e. dry – writer, with stiff upper lip, and all necessary protocol observed. Hollinghurst definitely sends himself up in this regard when a character sends a text message like: thinking of you 2 all day!! sleep well my darlin Wish I was there with u!! Cum back soon!!! XXXXXZ

There are also moments such as when Freddie and David discuss the literary merit of the fictional author VA Dax (much more of a James man than Hollinghurst himself even), and Freddie ponders: “I thought it was the kind of criticism that might have ensued if readers with no literary training were to write the newspaper notices instead of professional reviewers…” Ouch.

Well, all this clearly shows Hollinghurst’s mischievous side. And Sparsholt (despite the dreary title … we are even told how to pronounce it: ‘Spar…sholt’) is probably his drollest and most approachable book to date. Not to mention outright funny:

‘How do you know Ivan?’
Bradley hesitated, put his arm through Johnny’s and pulled him slightly aside. ‘I’ve got a cock, darling.’
‘Oh . . . yes.’

I think my thoughts on this book are encapsulated by Freddie’s comment that “It is hard to do justice to old pleasures that cannot be revived – we seem half to disown our youthful selves, who loved and treasured them.”

The Swimming Pool Library was one of the first-ever gay novels I read in my (distant) youth, by the first author whom I knew was openly gay (it could have been much worse: I wonder how my gay sensibility would have advanced if I had commenced with the oeuvre of Gordon Merrick, for example.)

I was amazed when Hollinghurst won the Booker for The Line of Beauty – a wonderful and unexpected surprise – and I really enjoyed The Stranger’s Child. Sparsholt, on the other hand, did not nearly have as much an impact on me as these previous books. I think what has happened with Hollinghurst is that he has transformed into that dreaded ‘figure to look up to’, as his influence can clearly be seen in vanguard writers like Garth Greenwell.

Reading Sparsholt, I wondered what kind of gay reader this book will appeal to. Would zeitgeist readers of, say, Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead, or even On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong be able to identify with it?

Hollinghurst has always written about a very specific kind of gay experience, in a very specific time period, and has very specific concerns (a lot of which are to do with history, culture, and literature. Invariably, this translates into furniture, paintings, and books. There is no other writer who can rhapsodise as eloquently about objets d’art as Hollinghurst can.

Sparsholt pretty much dusts off the entire Hollinghurst bag of tricks, and even refines the time-jumping technique of Stranger’s Child, whereby a different character (related to someone from the previous section), is introduced in the next.

I found it extraordinary that Hollinghurst makes no use of dates, but simply expects the reader to place him or herself by means of textual clues. While this is relatively straightforward in the Oxford and London sections, it becomes a tad trickier when we hit the latter decades, where Hollinghurst is actually forced to insert a date (like 1996), given the rapid rate of socio-political and technological change.

Why isn’t the impact of the HIV/Aids epidemic not referenced more directly by Hollinghurst, I wondered? I think this is because Hollinghurst is specifically interested in the period in the UK prior to the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which decriminalised homosexuality. The actual so-called Sparsholt Affair falls just on the wrong side of this divide, and it subsequently has a lasting legacy on all of the characters.

Critics of Hollinghurst always trot out the old sawhorse that his gay world (and viewpoint) is exclusively male. Well, this has a lot to do with the period that the author focuses on, and cannot be taken as evidence that he is a closet misogynist. One of the strongest parts of Sparsholt actually are the female characters, especially the lesbian coterie that not only introduces Johnny to the gay scene, but introduces him to the concept of a gay community.

The UK’s treatment of gay people up to 1967 was truly reprehensible, and among the most punitive in the entire world, I think. It both stigmatised and traumatised entire generations. Yes, there are younger and hipper queer writers out there now tackling the Pandora’s Box of gender, racial, and social issues bedevilling the modern world. But harking back to a particular historic period can do much to illuminate the present, as well as remind us all that gay history, and gay lineage, itself casts a very long shadow.

[Joachim Stoop · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel in 5 parts:

part 1: 4
part 2: 4,5
part 3: 1
part 4 & 5: 2

Proof that wonderful prose doesn't guarantee a compelling story.
This was waaaaay too long. The magnetic effect of the detailed descriptions and observations gradually lost power. I could't care less in the second half what yet another new soundalike character thought of this or that new lookalike character. Lots of editors seem to be on strike in 2017...

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Hollinghurst's sixth novel recapitulates both the structure and themes of his last novel, and therein lies both its strengths and weaknesses. Divided into 5 sections, each taking place some ten or 20 years from the previous one, the reader has to work hard to not only fill in the gaps, but keep characters straight who are offstage for long periods of time (e.g., Jill, a very minor character from part one, makes a reappearance 250 pages on, when others arrive at her funeral, and I couldn't for the life of me remember who the hell she was!). The first section, a brilliant pastiche of Waugh, Firbank and a hint of James, set in the blackout days of the Blitz, is so successful and delicious, that one becomes disappointed that the ensuing 350 pages are in both a more mundane style and never quite live up to the expectations raised.

The titular 'affair' is never fully delineated either, so it becomes something of a MacGuffin, and only glancingly alluded to ... one gets the general gist, but perhaps more explication would have enhanced its meaningfulness. It also bothered me that Hollinghurst twists himself in circles trying to stave off his main character's realization of the subject of a pivotal portrait until the final pages, when it's rather obvious he would have figured it out 100 pages earlier, by having read the manuscript that forms said first section. And though the major theme of the work appears to be how gay life has changed for the better and worse in the past 70 years, his supposedly cheery denouement, when the widowed Johnny apparently discovers the bliss of both a younger man and London clubbing as a 60 year old under the influence of E., doesn't quite ring true (... does anyone really think Johnny will find true lasting happiness with the execrably named Zé?).

Regardless, Hollinghurst is such a terrific stylist, and the prose such a pleasure to luxuriate in, I can't quite bring myself to give it a 4 star rating - but there are enough bumps and quibbles to prevent it being a full 5 either.

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my second Hollinghurst after his Booker winner The Line of Beauty, which really impressed me and may have given me unrealistic expectations for this one, which seemed less funny, harder work and less interesting.

The book is in five parts, in chronological order at irregular intervals, all several years apart. The first is written as a memoir of a term spent at Oxford University in 1940. It introduced a group of friends all fascinated by a first year oarsman David Sparsholt. The narrator Freddie Green is running a literary society at Christ Church college, and plans to invite the famous novelist Victor Dax to address them, who is the father of Evert Dax, another member of the group who us infatuated with Sparsholt.

The remaining four parts have an omniscient third person narrator, and their focal point is David's son Johnny, and follow him from a teenage holiday to his 60s, by which time he is a successful portrait painter.

The second part mixes the story of a family holiday in Cornwall and Johnny's obsession with his French friend Bastien with the events that give the book its title, a gay scandal involving David and an MP. Like the first section, it ends before what in retrospect will be seen to be a significant event.

The theme of fathers and sons continues in the third part. Johnny is working for an art dealer and restorer in London and is introduced to Evert Dax's Bohemian and mostly gay coterie. In the fourth part he is in a stable gay relationship and has a daughter with a lesbian couple. The final part sees him widowed and includes his father's death.

I must admit that my interest, particularly in the many gay relationships but also the art world gossip, waned more the further the story went on, and although it is undoubtedly well written and does what it sets out to, it did not leave me wanting to read more and I can see why it missed the Booker longlist...

[Trudie · Rating 3 out of 5]

* 3.5 *

This is my very first Hollinghurst and I was drawn to it by some notion of 1940s Oxford shenanigans. But the book is much broader in scope than that. Taking as it's canvas the cultural, social, and artistic changes in Britain over a period spanning the 1940s until today. The story is focused almost entirely on characters that are openly gay or very nearly so, and it is quite stunning and also eye-openingly bold in this regard. I have never read anything quite so beautifully written about the varieties of lust and desire and how changes in society impact these things but also how scandal from the past can overshadow your future . It is quite an exquisite feat of writing, ambitious in scope and yet ultimately a little bit of a disappointment in terms of a satisfying novel.

Hollinghurst is a sublime prose stylist. He is a master of the small moments, the tiny details of a glance, of a single utterance, capturing the nature of a person with a sentence. In describing the essential nature of a room he somehow manages to convey the taste and foibles of an entire decade. In fact this novel is a useful survey course in changing taste in art, literature and architecture over this 80 year epoch.
Divided into 5 sections, the first two make the book worthwhile. 1940s Oxford, thrums with sex which is eluded to slyly and largely off the page. The enforced blackouts of the era and the stark divisions of class captured so well. David Sparsholt the unobtainable Adonis with a regimental fitness regime.
We then jump forward in time, leaping into the world of adolescence, and the claustrophobic feeling of a vacation in Cornwall in the late 1950s. Once again it works by eluding to so much happening off the page and by being so lushly sensual and also awkward almost simultaneously.
Unfortunately, The Sparsholt Affair settles into being an elegant yet laborious slog the more the story moves through time. There are too many characters, old Oxford people pop up after long absences. It feels haughty, confined as it is to an artistic, upper middle class milieu, people drift around airily painting things or reading their memoirs. Johnny Sparsholt with his beautiful hair just never came alive for me. I struggled to marry up the boy to the older man he becomes, this is a problem when he is the anchor for most of the novel.
If only the magical element that infused those first two sections could have been continued through the entire novel then this would have been a 5-star read for me.

A beautiful failure ? but with some of the best writing I have read this year.

I now absolutely need to read The Line of Beauty.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Alan Hollinghurst is known in literary circles as THE author who authentically chronologies gay life. He a noted author and one I wanted to explore, and as he writes infrequently, I chose to read his latest novel, “The Sparsholt Affair”.

“The Sparsholt Affair” spans nearly seventy years. Hollinghurst beautifully documents our shifting/changing attitudes towards gays. He also leaves the reader with the sad reality that society continues to prohibit gays to be as open about their life and love as straight people take for granted. Hollinghurst doesn’t preach, he writes and shows and illuminates.

The story begins with a young David Sparsholt who unknowingly attracts the attention of gay men at Oxford University. Sparsholt is only at Oxford for a term before joining the Royal Air Force. Although only attending one term, his impact on this group of friends becomes life long.

The majority of the story revolves around Johnny Sparsholt, David’s son. Johnny is in his early teens when David is involved in a scandalous affair that shadows both their lives.

From the teen years, Hollinghurst brings Johnnie to college life where he finds the same friends that David had at Oxford. Johnnie is openly gay and Hollinghurst uses him to take the reader on a journey of gay life in the 1960’s through the 1990’s. David and Johnnie never find an endearing relationship. David is pure military and keeps Johnnie and his openly gay life at a distance.

This is an epic of a story that reads well. It is a true literary genius that can write of banal life and keep the reader absorbed. I’ll read his Man Booker winning novel “The Line Of Beauty”. His prose is amazing.

[Dickon Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was fortunate enough to be sent an advance proof of this, just in time for my MA dissertation on music in the novels of Hollinghurst... Very grateful to Picador for that.

As of 15 Oct 2017, I've written a more thorough review for Birkbeck University's Contemporary Literature website. It features some detective work on my part, regarding the real-life images in the novel:

http://www.ccl.bbk.ac.uk/pics-or-it-d...

Briefly, I liked it a lot. Though I do like Hollinghurst a lot, regardless. Any Hollinghurst novel is a work of art: I feel my brain thanking me whenever I read one.

Having read all 6 of AH's novels, I'd put The Sparsholt Affair as my 4th favourite, the list being:

1) The Line of Beauty
2) The Spell
3) The Swimming-Pool Library
4) The Sparsholt Affair
5) The Stranger's Child
6) The Folding Star

The Line of Beauty is still AH's masterpiece, in terms of being stuffed with beautiful sentences, witty observations, satire and symbolism. It would be the one I'd direct AH newcomers to: it's up there with The Great Gatsby in terms of literary perfection. The Swimming-Pool Library is important in terms of queer literary history. The Spell seems quite light at first, but I've found myself growing increasingly fond of it. It's also the novel that brought out John Updike's latent homophobia in his review at the time: he ended up reviewing the trouble with homosexuality full stop. Perhaps The Spell needs to go into a Goodreads list: 'Books That Reveal Bigotry In Reviewers'.

Anyway, The Sparsholt Affair seems to be the second movement in AH's second symphony. That's if one takes (from his interviews) the idea that his first four novels were all movements in a first symphony, one framed by gay male characters in the 1980s and 1990s (one character from SPL turns up in LOB, proving the existence of a Hollingverse). This second symphony is made up, so far, of The Stranger's Child and The Sparsholt Affair. They're both five-part books, each part dipping into a different historical period. Hollinghurst's perspectives are much more fluid than in his first 4 books: the core POV might suddenly shift to one character for one or two scenes only, as it does with the servant boy in The Stranger's Child. One feels that these two latter novels are more about the way some art and ideas can last, while people and reputations come and go.

In fact, The Sparsholt Affair's first part, in the 1940s, is told from the POV of - shock horror! - a heterosexual man. When novelists become well-known, the danger might be that they only become well-known for doing the same sort of thing. Are they worried about repeating themselves? Or do they need to keep up the Great Project? Sarah Waters moved away from lesbian protagonists: I'm sure there's burning discussions elsewhere as to whether this was a good move for her. Perhaps, I dunno, Lee Child should start writing about introspective gay men who just want to listen to Radio 3, and Hollinghurst should take over Jack Reacher for a while. Discuss.

That said, the 1940s narrator in TSA is often mistaken for being gay - something that gestures at the bisexuality and ambiguous masculinity also hinted at in The Stranger's Child. David Sparsholt himself is a frustratingly vague character, who may (or may not) have been 'gay for pay' on at least two occasions. His vagueness is obviously intended, but, as with the ending of The Stranger's Child, I sometimes wish Hollinghurst would reward his readers with a little more revelation into the answers behind his novels' mysteries. It needn't detract from the journey.

A thought on influence: AH is a self-confessed admirer of the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn. Certainly, as the decades change and children take over the main perspectives, the device of renaming a former protagonist as 'X's father' (keep up at the back!) felt very much like a nod to St Aubyn.

Another thought: the cover of this novel should really be a crumpled pencil sketch of a muscular male torso. [Edit: I've changed my mind about this! The current cover makes sense, and is certainly very bookshop friendly. Light-coloured covers attract fingerprints...]

One shock: some characters discuss porn on Tumblr and WhatsApp. There's also a young character who is a self-confessed gerontophile (prefers older men to younger) Another Goodreads list right there. Or even a sub-genre.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

 
Identification

But how strange the chat between artist and sitter became in the long shadow of Pat's death, he couldn't describe it, it seemed a molecular change in the material of life itself. He knew his role so well, thirty years in the business, part servant, part entertainer, the visiting artisan with his humble superiority, his gift, and now and then the air of inspiration with which he pleased them, reassured them, and kept his distance. He followed the familiar pattern of talk, nothing serious or sequential; he agreed, made brief distracted demurrals, eyes focused on detail; he kept things away from himself, an inveterate habit with new force. Everything in their talk was somehow of having (however fretful and spoilt and blind), as if having was their right, and unending. They hadn't started to imagine his condition, where everything was crystallized in the aching cold of having lost.

Alan Hollinghurst certainly knows how to write; almost any page of his new novel is a distinct pleasure, simply to know your are in the hands of a master. "Crystallized in the aching cold of having lost": I originally intended just to quote this one sentence, about a man grieving the loss of his life partner. But then I read back over the entire paragraph, admiring its skill, its punctuation even, its combination of ordinary words with surprising ones, its double voice of author and subject at once, and its ability to take the reader into the mind of a society portrait painter, Jonathan Sparsholt.

That last is important, for beyond even his skill with words, a good novelist persuades the reader to identify with his characters, or at least to understand them. It does not matter that few of those readers will be artists, let alone famous portrait painters; what matters is the ability to make us see through this artist's eyes, and ideally to feel with his heart. Hollinghurst has written superbly about art in the two previous novels I have read, The Line of Beauty (2004) and The Stranger's Child (2011), but it is all the more important here because Johnny Sparsholt (pronounced spar-sholt), is clearly destined to become an artist when we first see him as a teenager in Book Two, and he remains as protagonist all the way through Book Five. Not only the many passages that show him at work, but also those that reference the work of historical artists such as Whistler, Pasmore, and Hepworth, come alive in Hollinghurst's hands, so that you read them with a quickening of the pulse or flash of sudden insight.

In saying "identify with the characters," I went out on a limb, because the question of identification keeps coming up as a shibboleth of criticism. We read reviewers who pan a novel because they don't like the characters in it; it feeds our ego as self-styled sophisticated readers to dismiss such views. Understanding is different; we expect the novelist to make us understand why characters act as they do, even if we wouldn't behave that way ourselves. But identification is somewhere in between. We certainly don't expect a novelist to give us a slice of our own biographies. But it is still very gratifying when something in the fiction reflects experiences of our own—perhaps a spurious pleasure, but still undeniable. Conversely, I suppose it is also spurious to be turned off by something we cannot identify with at all, but that reaction too is hard to deny.

The Sparsholt Affair follows a group of people who knew each other at Oxford in 1940. As each section moves forward by 15 or 20 years right up to the present time, we see them as professionals or parents, and we meet the younger generations. As this happens to be more or less my own lifespan and I am British too, most of the social world is familiar. But this is largely happenstance. I believe that Hollinghurst's writing is such that even younger readers from other backgrounds will be able to imagine themselves into these situations also. But there are two aspects that lie outside the common experience. One is the art, which Hollinghurst handles superbly. The other is the gay sex, which he also describes with vivid frankness but which, try as I might, increasingly left me on the outside.

In my review of The Stranger's Child, I noted the extraordinary quality of Book One. It was the same here, though even more so. For ninety pages, I was riveted in fascination. Part of this, I admit, had to do with my identification—or rather, my ability to extrapolate from my own experience. I was at Cambridge rather than Oxford, and twenty years later, but the psychological atmosphere was quite simply right. True, the plot concerns the homoerotic attraction that the manly freshman David Sparsholt, up at Oxford for a term before training as a fighter pilot, exerts over several of the other characters, even though there seems little chance of his reciprocating it. But so perfectly has Hollinghurst caught the ambiguities of that first encounter with the university world, the combination of brashness and uncertainty that played out in any romantic relationship, and even the question many of us still had about our own sexuality, that it makes the whole episode painfully real. The same could be said of Book Two, when the focus shifts to David's teenage son Johnny, hopelessly in love with his French exchange guest Bastien. But here again we can identify; Hollinghurst writes of the age of raging hormones, when no teenager fully knows who he (or she) is and is not. Besides, much of the focus is on the father and his associates, whom we see though the skewed eyes of the half-admiring, half-resentful son. So far, this was a six-star book, and I was thoroughly invested.

With Books Three through Five, we move forward into the world of artistic London, much of it gay. Even here, I found a lot to identify with, for example the thrilled embarrassment of the young man from the provinces finding himself thrust into a circle of older sophisticates (a theme I also remember from The Line of Beauty ). But increasingly every such scene in the book will involve gay sex, all the way from flirtation to encounters described in physical detail. I mentioned to my wife the problem of knowing how to review these sections. Her advice was not to concentrate on the acts but on the relationships which led to them. But this was my problem. I don't know whether it is characteristic of the period or the age of the characters, but so many of the sexual encounters spring up without any relationships at all. In Johnny's first encounter with this circle, he looks lustfully at one man, gets groped by another, and ends up in an embrace with a third. Several times in later scenes, he will be diverted from a date implying some degree of commitment by a chance encounter in a club or a public convenience. It is true that the quotation above, which comes from near the end of Book Five, is triggered by the death of one person with whom he apparently did have a committed relationship, but the dead Pat is a minor character and we learn next to nothing about their lives together. Of the numerous sex scenes in the book, most arise out of lust, a welcome few from affection, but almost none as a celebration of love and commitment.

So identification? Not throughout, no. As the novel went on, I found myself increasingly skimming these sections, waiting for the brilliant parts about art or even more about the fascinating interconnected web of people and generations; with those, I could identify; with the rest, not. Perhaps the fault lies with me, but even so, it prevents me from giving that fifth star.

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems the general consensus, based on reviews of Hollinghurst’s new novel, is that he’s recycled the structure of his prior novel, The Stranger’s Child, and that the vast majority of critics feel that this structure worked better in that novel than it does here. 



Having been a long-time fan of Hollinghurst, and having read his work in order, watching his prose develop and observing as his scope gets wider and wider, I beg to disagree. While I liked The Stranger’s Child, I felt that the shifting points-of-view and the fragments worked against that novel—largely because there was just too much plot. Here, though, in The Sparsholt Affair, plot is so secondary that the passing of time, the fragments, and the more figural narrative used to focus mostly on Johnny Sparsholt, the son of the infamous David Sparsholt of the titular affair, work in this novel’s favor. Because, in truth, the novel is not above the affair so much as it’s about its repercussions: familial, filial, across generations as society and culture change (specifically with regard to homosexuality), all spanning the literary and artistic worlds, peopled by figures whose work Hollinghurst describes in such detail—this novel, indeed, had some of the best writing about admiring paintings and about painting paintings that I’ve ever read—that you wish they were real so that you could read their books and view their works of art.


Although Hollinghurst said in interviews that the figural narrative he employed in The Line of Beauty, his best novel, was not one he would use again, he’s mostly done it here, and that’s what makes this novel work so well. Spanning the 1940s to the 2010s, The Sparsholt Affair owes as much to James for its astute comments on social class, understated and often unspoken sexual desire, and its use of ambiguity (especially in terms of conversations that are so insular it can often be hard to know to what’s being referred) as it does to Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Just as Woolf hardly ever gives us Jacob on his own, preferring instead to give others’ portraits and memories of Jacob to give the reader an impression of him, so, too, does Hollinghurst not divulge the full content of the Sparsholt affair. While this may frustrate most readers—and, I would argue, this is where most readers’ discontent with this novel likely lies—this is not a novel about the affair itself, but about how cloaked and veiled such incidents have had to be throughout a century that first condemned homosexuality and then began, slowly, to become more accepting of it. Even Johnny Sparsholt, toward the end, in passages that are reminiscent of Hollinghurst’s The Spell, tries to immerse himself in the gay scene of the 2010s despite nearing the age of sixty: this is a novel about generation gaps and loneliness and mortality and feeling so isolated from one’s own sexuality due to social norms that the titular affair itself is but metonym that drives Hollinghurst’s examination of these themes forward.



I would highly recommend that those new to Hollinghurst do not start here. The Line of Beauty is perhaps the best starting point, despite most of his other novels paling in comparison to that gem of a book; The Swimming-Pool Library is another good starting point. Here, in The Sparsholt Affair, all of Hollinghurst’s previous novels and their concerns are present, which is perhaps why I appreciated it as much as I did: it’s both him looking back over the past century and him looking back over his past novels. To me, it reads like closure of a kind, and I know, without a doubt that we can continue to expect amazing things from Hollinghurst: the best living gay British author, hands down.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars
“It is hard to do justice to old pleasures that cannot be revived—we seem half to disown our youthful selves, who loved and treasured them.”
This novel spans seventy years. It is very English starting in wartime Oxford in the early 1940s. There are five snapshots in time with some recurring characters and their offspring/partners. There is a queer note running through it as the main character Johnny is gay. He does not appear in the first part, though his father David does. There are glimpses of gay life and coming out in the 1940s, 1960s, 1970s, 1990s and finally 2010s. It had a bit of the feel of A Dance to the Music of Time and it really does feel very English. Hollinghurst has been called the heir to Henry James, although as far as I am aware James never wrote any scenes involving blue dildos …
The title relates to David (Johnny’s father) and was a 1960s scandal involving gay sex and MPs. The scandal is always just off the screen and we never really find out quite how it happened. We see the nature of gay life in Oxford in wartime and in each snapshot, ending with the age of Grindr in the 2010s. The novel is from a variety of perspectives; Freddie Green in the 1940s, Johnny himself, Lucy Johnny’s daughter (not by the usual method), who has two mummies.
There is a sense of nostalgia about the whole thing. The old pre-legality, pre social media ways of communication: glances, smiles, a different semaphore in contrast who the very upfront ways of today. One thing to mention, the whole AIDS epidemic is conspicuous by its complete absence. That felt odd to me. I know Hollinghurst says that he wants to show the effects of these things without telling, but I don’t think he succeeds here.
On the whole this did work and following the characters from the beginning (the 1940s section) to death is quite effective. As I have said, omitting AIDS completely was a mistake. It is also very English and very middle class.

[Andrew Schirmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sigh.
A new novel by Alan Hollinghurst is always an event. The paucity of Hollinghurst's output has been well-noted, the adherence to a leisurely timetable of a novel every 6-7 years. Add to this the Brexit-discounted pound, how could one not place a pre-order with Amazon UK and await the post for an early Xmas?

Early signs were good. The Sparsholt Affair is another grand canvas much in mould of The Stranger's Child, five distinct parts composing an elegant ellipsis. It begins in a place that Hollinghurst seems most at ease, the past--wartime Oxford--with a most assured style and humor. There are even a few female characters. Each section is perforated by large gaps in time and the defining events of the novel are never discussed in detail.

Without giving away too much, the key problem with The Sparsholt Affair seems to be that so much has been elided, there is little left. Characters are not fully fleshed out, with some inexplicably banished to the sidelines. I can do no better than to quote Adam Mars-Jones writing in the LRB: "The book has turned its back on the road it seemed to mark out for itself, and readers are shielded from vulgar drama. But if everything important is relegated to the peripheries or takes place in the gaps between sections, what's in the centre? Is there really no need for one?"

Additionally, Johnny Sparsholt's midlife Molly indulgence and wrangling of dating apps rings a bit false, it nearly brings to mind the risible potshots at counterculture in the last volume of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence.

Hollinghurst's aim is laudable--the reverberation of a persona and scandal through a tightly constructed series of refractions--but it doesn't quite come off. An elegant disappointment.

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A big meaty sprawling book that demands a certain level of attention from the reader. At times I absolutely loved it— but then a character reappeared who I could not recall and that tarnished it a bit (note that I blame the book and not the inattentive reader). The whole side-story with Jill is presented and dropped. And of course, I did not like the end. One never likes the end, except when it is especially well-done, and that is vanishingly rare.

Despite whatever I've said so far, there is much to admire here. I raved about it while in the middle of it, although my ardor has cooled somewhat now that I've had to endure another half-hearted stab at crafting an ending.

It is certainly an interesting complex novel, of the sort one feels to have lived with, for the duration. Perhaps the lack of tidy resolution is meant to reflect the realities of life itself. Perhaps, just perhaps, my desire for perfect endings is a craving for fantasy, and what this sprawling novel dishes up is more akin to life itself.

[Olaf Gütte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Für meinen Geschmack ein paar Schwule zuviel,
glücklicherweise geht es aber auch noch um Kunst und ein wenig Literatur.
Alan Hollinghursts Schreibstil ist elegant und wie es sich für einen Engländer gehört,
phasenweise auch etwas vornehm.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

“She had got out three possible photos for the order of service, which might have been captioned “War Hero”, “Criminal”, “Old Gent”.

A multi-decadal and multi-generational novel – in five distinct sections, which traces a group of people who meet at the start of the Second World War and the interactions of their lives (and those of their children and grandchildren) over the next 60 years. At the same time the novel explores changing social attitudes over that period and over generations – particularly in the area of sexual relations. My first novel by this Booker prize winning author.

The first section - A New Man - is set in Oxford University in late 1940 – a date we gather from a signed nude sketch (one which features at intervals in the story). The story is a kind of Brideshead Revisited pastiche. It is dictated in the first person and we learn drawn up by Freddie Green – an observer and diarist of the group of friends – found many years later in his papers after his death.

His friends – particularly the dashing Evert Dax (son of a famous but already little read author) and Peter – an artist – compete for the attentions and attempted seduction of a new first year student – a hugely muscular, rower and engineering-studying 17 year old from the Midlands - David Sparsholt, more spurred on than put off by the appearance of his fiancée.

The sketch is by Peter of David, although it is Evert who (according to the memoirs) succeeds in the seduction in unspoken exchange for a loan to pay a college fine for David having Connie in his rooms. Freddie meanwhile competes unsuccessfully for the attentions of another student Jill – while seemingly unaware of his own obsession with David.

I did find a number of false notes in this section – for example I was really unsure what to make in a literary novel of:

Jill …. It had always made me uneasy; it was too close to chill and to jilt, and no far from gill, a quarter-pint of cold water

The second section – The Lookout – is set in 1966 on a Sparsholt family holiday in Cornwall. Told in the third party from the point of view of David’s son – Johnny. While Johnny obsesses over the French exchange student Bastien visiting him (and is dismayed by Bastien’s apparent change in sexual confidence and widening of sexual orientation since the two had a relationship the previous year when Johnny visited France) all the time largely oblivious to the sexual tension between his father (who we learn was a distinguished war hero and squadron leader and now an engineering magnate) and another man and their relationship with a local politician.

The third section – Small Oils – is set in 1974. It is not difficult to guess that given the power cuts (which reference back to the blackouts of the first section) and references to a possible Communist government, but in case we are at all confused we are also told of the three-day-week plus told (rather incongruously) about a new TV programme - Kojak - and that there is a general election. I had to wonder if it would not simply have been easier to have headed the section 1974.

And given the second section’s setting in 1966 is crucial (given it came a year before the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 – which decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men over 21 - it was interesting (and says something about the characters in the story) that any Englishman’s obvious link to that date was omitted and the dates instead narrowed down to 1965-66 by Sparsholt’s ownership of a relatively new Jensen C-V8 Mark III (sic).

In this section, in a multi third party point of view style, Johnny (now a twenty something) comes into contact with some of the friends from the 1940s – some of whom meet to read from their memoirs. There are a range of sexual attractions and relations across generations and orientations.

We gather that David’s father has been disgraced in an incident (“The Sparsholt Affair”) – probably shortly after The Lookout section. This incident is never directly referred to, although we gather it involved male prostitution, an MP, and photos taken through a window. I thought this oblique reference to the incident – for example “it was a big story wasn’t it for a while. Money, power … gay shenanigans! It had everything” was rather well done: I believe Hollinghurst was aiming for something of the feel of past scandals – e.g. the Profumo scandal, where everyone can remember the fact of the scandal and the names of those involved – but few the actual details.

David’s homosexuality, when cast in light of his father’s notoriety, adds an extra attraction for those who come into contact with him and a number of people remark on the tragic irony that the acts for which David’s father (and others) were disgraced were legal only 1-2 years later.

Again I struggled with some false notes in this section. For example - Johnny (to give an idea of his character and background) is a boarding school boy, works in an art gallery restoring paintings, hates listening to Radio 4 as he feels deprivation from Radio 3 (not Radio 1 but Radio 3). However hearing another character – one who he knows lives with an older man – described as a gerontophile we are told that: “Johnny smiled … through some association with the name Geraint he guessed this was the word for a Welshman” which I found a weak joke on Hollinghurst’s behalf and an unlikely mistake for Johnny to make.

The fourth section – Losses – is set in 1995 (one of the characters actually askes another character what the year is, this time).

Losses has a double meaning – there are two deaths/funerals – of Jill (of /Chill/Jilt/Gill fame) and of Freddie Green – and to everyone’s shock Jill is revealed as a life long kleptomaniac (luckily the actual phrase is not used – so we don’t have to see what joke Hollinghurst can produce this time – although we do get a character who restores old organs from a certain decade just so we can have the following dialogue.

“You restore organs”
“Restoration organs … Organs built in the 1660s”
“.. So you do Restoration Organ restoration”

Johnny (now a portrait painter) gains access to Freddie’s papers including it seems the unpublished narrative that is the first section. I was confused that he still seemed unable to identify the sketch of his father that Peter painted despite lots of clunky observations which seem to steer around the subject – others remark that the portrait is almost unrealistically muscular (“it must have been a body builder, a bit grotesque frankly”), only a 4 pages later Johnny notes in passing that his father is “muscled to an abnormal degree for a man in his seventies”).

He also engineers (I may as well join in the bad jokes – perhaps my review may win a Booker prize as a result) a poignant meeting between his father and Evert – after which his father openly but unconvincingly contradicts Green’s account of their 1940s interaction.

Large parts of this section are written through the eyes of Lucy – Freddie’s father via surrogacy of two lesbian mothers who befriend him in the third section. Lucy appears to be a 7 year old, and this section is I believe partly inspired by Henry James “What Maisie Knew”. Now with three daughters and five nieces under 12 (and from years of children’s work) one thing I think I know a little about is the mind of a 7 year old girl and this was to me a very unconvincing portrait.

“Lucy knew most of the pictures, and the main interest lay in seeing them uprooted, divorced, regrouped and sometimes repaired”

The last section is set in 2002 (with the aid of some maths, David being 90 the next year) – Johnny driving an “old red Vulva .. smelly dented and rusted … rimmed in a delicate moss that had not itself died” (I mean really?!?!) has lost his husband Pat, and is discovering Grindr, Ecstasy, sexting and online porn, as well as (to his unspoken relief) a generation that no longer makes any association to the Sparsholt affair ( “Sorry, what was it called. A movie, right” ) although his father’s death and the subsequent obituaries bring back into focus (and the existence of Wikipedia gives people the ability to access it – including a makeover TV star whose family portrait he paints, her son in an Arsenal strip being my second favourite character in the book).

Driving in his trust to Nuneaton he reflects it was:

“a journey of an hour and ten minutes with half a century packed in”

In what I thought was a neat metaphor for the book:

450 pages with half a century of sexual revolution packed in

Although in Nuneaton it strikes David how little has really changed as he watches a man and woman in their twenties cuddling and kissing casually as they walk along and

“felt a weary resentment of them, their happiness, claiming the full heterosexual allowance to carry on in public”

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now this novel has been highly lauded but I was underwhelmed. Partly I think this was mismanaged expectations but I seemed to pick out and highlight all the weakest parts of the novel and was less affected by the great characterisation or descriptive language everyone else appears to have seen. I have tried to identify why I turned against this novel early on and I think it came down to two main (and related) aspects.

The first was the group of characters we meet in the first section – who set the tone for much of the rest of the book. A group of public school educated, middle-upper class, uniformly white, Southern, Arts students at Oxford – pretty well the exact opposite of my friendship group at University in every respect (if I can be allowed to take light blue as the opposite of dark blue). At one stage for example we are told, rather dismissively, “Barrett was another Brasenose refugee, a small northern scientist of some type” – that pretty well describes the average person at my college.

The second point relates to the eponymous student come engineering magnate – who is simultaneously at the heart of the novel and yet largely absent from it. Reading the first section, when we are told “scientists … moved in their own severe routines, set apart from the rest of us” , I immediately identified with the “rest” rather than the “us” and this was only confirmed in the second section :

“Johnny saw in a minute that it was the transepts that made the church, with their tall clear windows, and several old marble tablets on the walls, each with its own little commonplace queirk of design. Light from the south transept lay tall across the darker nave: the higher pulpit with its rough oak panelling and brass candlesticks glowed and the hymn numbers stood out vividly above. His father studied [the hymn numbers] for a second, looked down on the floor, and told them the Highest Common Factor”

This is the character I would have liked to read about and understand directly

“So we return to the question of the … alpha and omega. Does he mean that I’m the be-all and end- all?

“Well indeed” I said “Or does he mean” and I was as tactfully objective as possible “that was not only the first time, but the last time too”

As I started my review – this was my first Alan Hollinghurst novel, I have tried to be tactful and objective in my comments, but it will be my last one too.

2.5 stars rounded up for now.

[Nicolas Chinardet · Rating 2 out of 5]

"When he came back from the loo, Ivan smiled at the others but he had the stupid feeling of having missed something - They were already adjusting to what had happened, the formulas of surprise passed around, repeated but diminishing, half-phrases. He looked from one to another as if the joke might yet be on him. 'What is it...?'

These few lines come fairly late in the book (p327) but summarise very well in my view the experience of reading this book.

Hollinghurst's perverse decision to seemingly only relate the insignificant episodes of his story, without ever telling the meaningful ones in much detail, means that we in fact know very little of what the various potential Sparsholt affairs occurring in the book might actually entail, thus making the book's title itself rather a misnomer.

Incidentally, I seriously doubt that a public scandal involving circumstances such as we have to guess them to be, would retain the hold on the collective memory of a whole country we are asked to believe it does, to the point that it would echo through the main protagonist's life for over 60 years.

There is a good and interesting book in here somewhere, some of it is actually quite enjoyable. I like the premise and there is a potentially very interesting cast of characters. BUT the whole thing is smothered by the nominal sentences, the non sequiturs, and the confusing use of incongruous phrasings that fail to be truly poetic. But, both at the level of the structure and the telling of the story, Hollinghurst's immoderate and unwarranted use of the ellipsis creates something that comes at the reader out of a dense fog in which one much too often has to feel one's way and squint to try and make out the outlines of characters and events as they whisk past. The reader is kept at bay by this and finds it quite difficult to care for any of the character, including the main protagonist (Johnny can't really be called a hero).

I regularly had to reread sentences to try and make sense of what meaning they were supposed to convey. This was particularly the case in the second of the five sections of the book. The first section, supposedly written by one of the characters, is the most conventionally written and the most readable and enjoyable for it. But on the whole I was rather put off by the writing from someone who is supposed to be a great stylist. It generally doesn't flow very well and often simply feels sloppy.

If The Line of Beauty is the zenith in Hollingshurt's production so far, then The Sparsholt Affair surely must be its nadir.

[Lisa (NY) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rich, ambitious and bursting with potential - this novel felt flat - especially compared to the author's novel "The Line of Beauty." The novel opens at Oxford during the London Blitz in 1940 and centers around David Sparsholt. Although the novel is named after his later scandal, he remains an enigma throughout. There were many passages and sentences that I admired, but I did not enjoy this novel. If it were not for my book club, I doubt that I would have finished it.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I've developed an interest in him purely as the focus of your interest. Yours and Peter's,” I added, and watched him scowl. “I'm following the whole Sparsholt affair scientifically.”

I haven't read Alan Hollinghurst before, and as The Sparsholt Affair began, I thought I was in for a real treat: The first section – set at Oxford in 1940, with gowns and blackouts and fire watches on the ramparts – was wonderfully atmospheric, and as a group of young men yearn and strive for physical closeness (the narrator with his girlfriend, Jill; two other male characters hoping to catch the eye of the young Adonis across the quad who lifts weights in his underthings), I was yearning with them; this section ticked all my boxes of interest and narrative tension. The next section, however, skips ahead twenty or so years, switching to the perspective of the thirteen-year-old son of Sparsholt (who was the original Adonis), and while there's atmosphere and yearning of a different kind, the shift drained the tension of the original section. The next three sections continue to skip ahead ten or twenty years at a time, staying from the perspective of this son, Jonathan, and the plot never regained the pleasure of the original bit for me. An uneven experience, but with something interesting to say in the end – I would definitely read Hollinghurst again. (Note: Despite being published last fall in the UK, I read an ARC of the upcoming North American release, and as such, quotes may not be in their final forms. In my copy, Jonathan's red Volvo becomes a “Vulva” in later chapters, and I wondered whether this was a spellcheck issue or an inside joke. Either way, it highlights the dangers of quoting from an ARC, which I can't resist.)

He expected the old man to come round at some point to the Sparsholt Affair, but he never did, perhaps simply because it didn't involve him or anyone he knew personally, and was, besides, a hideous balls-up, of the kind that Chalmers himself, for all his much wilder adventures, had been far too clever to get caught up in.

In the foreground of the plot, the original group of Oxford friends go on to live successful lives after doing their duties in WWII, and when Jonathan grows up and becomes an artist, his path intersects with some of those who had known his father at school. At some point, the father was involved in a scandal – known infamously as the titular Sparsholt Affair – and while details are sketchy, it involved crooked land deals, male prostitutes, and disgraced politicians. Sparsholt himself went to jail over the matter, and despite being an openly gay man himself, Jonathan wasn't close enough to his father to ever ask him just what went on. And in the background, there's a lovely evolution of the gay scene. There are no activists in this story, characters simply take the dominant ethos for granted – so in the beginning, we have the closeted friends at Oxford being careful not to let the Censor discover what they're up to; Jonathan comes out in a world with shadowy gay clubs and partners beginning to live openly together, finding ways to make babies; Jonathan himself marries his longtime partner at one point; and in the end, when he becomes a widower, Jonathan discovers the current world of debauched raves and Grinder and self-made porn on Instagram. Over everything, as the world around him becomes more permissive, Jonathan feels the weight of his father's scandal; even as society eventually moves on and people need to look up the Sparsholt Affair in Wikipedia to remind themselves what it was all about.

"I shouldn't tell you this, it's what my Samuel calls the picture – our portrait, I mean. The Sparsholt Affair...Seriously, though, I suppose with something like that, it could colour your whole life if you let it.”

What I liked about this in retrospect was the shadowy nature of the “Sparsholt Affair” itself: we have no idea how the elder Sparsholt was actually involved in the scandal – he did go to jail, but this was long after homosexual activity itself would get you sent away – but because there was a mention of “male prostitutes” at the bust-up, the whole thing is remembered as a sex scandal instead of a dodgy land deal. (Naturally, this made me thing of the “Profumo Affair”: who doesn't remember that, if it's thought of at all today, as a sex thing instead of a Cold War spy thing?) And then this manufactured uncertainty made me think What if the elder Sparsholt never had any gay flings in the first place? His activities at Oxford are only reported by Freddie in the first section, in papers he never published, and as he went on to become a novelist, that narrative just might be a bit of wish fulfillment for his friends. Or, Evert might have actually said “I had him” after an evening with Sparsholt, but that doesn't make it true. This uncertainty, and the way that rumours can, indeed, colour one's entire life, elevated the whole for me.

This was just a dead man's face, which the light of scandal might play over as readily as that of acclaim. He thought the convention was to kiss the dead parent on the brow, but a sense that that wasn't his father's style deterred him, and he felt he wouldn't regret not having done so. He took out his pocketbook, moved the visitor's chair to the head of the bed and sat down and drew him, a rapid but careful and observant sketch, five minutes' intent work. He thought, this is what we get to do. He couldn't remember for the life of him what colour his father's eyes had been.

A final note: Hollinghurst writes continually of missing fathers – physically or emotionally – and young gay men who are gerontophiles (some may have been looking for Sugar Daddies, but others do seem to be turned on by the greybeards), and I don't know if he meant to have the two conflated in the readers' minds; but don't see how it couldn't have been intentional. In the end, I loved the first section, but didn't find Jonathan himself to be interesting enough to carry off the rest of the book. I appreciated the subtle evolution of the gay scene, and the progression of society's attitudes, in the background; loved that Jonathan bore his father's scandal upon his shoulders even long after others had forgotten about it; this book has much of interest to say. I'm conflicted between three and four stars, but will feel generous in a rounding up.

[Nigeyb · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first Hollinghurst and certainly not my last. Some have said to me that this is not his best, if so then I cannot wait to read more because this is magnificent.

It reminds me of two other books: Anthony Powell's beguiling 12 novel series A Dance to the Music of Time, which I adored, as it uses a broad sweep of decades of English cultural, artistic and social changes as its canvas; and also, to a lesser extent, Anthony Quinn's wonderful Freya trilogy.

It's an epic novel which convincingly evokes a group of friends and relatives whose lives and times straddle three generations.

Across five different sections, the novel describes changing attitudes and morality through five stunningly evoked episodes: the dreaming spires of Oxford University in 1940; a family holiday in Cornwall in the early 1960s; London's newly liberated gay scene of the mid-70s; into the mid 1990s; and finally to 2012. I've consciously not said much about the plot however the narrative structure works brilliantly and we gradually glean more about the characters, the times in which they live, their back stories and personalities, and of course the somewhat opaque "Sparsholt Affair".

The Sparsholt Affair is a dazzling novel of desire, of fathers and sons, of family and legacy, which explores the social and sexual revolutions of twentieth century and then right to the heart of the internet and dating apps. Indeed, in a novel awash with high points, perhaps the most moving part describes how a bereaved man, whose life partner has died, is thrust back into the world of dating, now driven by smart phone apps and the internet.

The Sparsholt Affair is a triumph. I look forward to reading more by Alan Hollinghurst.

5/5

[John Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

4/5

I’m lost for words, unlike A.H. His seem to flow effortlessly across the page. So, my stab at a review will probably be a series of random thoughts.

The novel spans 70+ years – c. 1939 – c. 2012, set in England; it’s the most English novel I’ve read in a long time. Perhaps it should be required reading on the syllabus of would-be British citizens. Some no doubt would change their minds half way through the book, questioning their sanity in wanting to be “one of us” in the first place.

It opens in war time Oxford, students enlisting for King and Country. The ones we meet are gay (in the ‘friends of Dorothy’ sense) closeted or otherwise: they couldn’t emerge into the open until the late 1960s when the law was changed. But the closet is a very British institution and it will lurk on regardless into 2012 and beyond. It will help define personal relationships, especially father/son ones and contribute to the rise and fall of the mighty, particularly in public life.

The book is set in the heart of the art world at this time, generally in London, home of the Establishment too. Johnny Sparsholt is an artist, gay and the son of David Sparsholt, a successful businessman, a very pillar of the establishment, but then there’s this Sparsholt Affair...

If you want to know more you know what to do… I urge you to. It’s beautifully written, echoes for me at times of E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, L.P. Hartley but Hollinghurst has his own strong and lovely voice.

[emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has pretty much all the things I disliked about The Stranger's Child, multiplied by three. I don't know what it is about Hollinghurst's novels; the premises have always everything I enjoy in life, and then the actual novels leave me feeling empty. Basically this is just a story about the long-term effects a very handsome dude has on multiple people in the course of 70 or so years, and that is just not enough plot to support a nearly-500-pages novel.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since Hollinghurst’s debut novel ‘The Swimming Pool Library’ in 1988, he’s published a new book in approximately six year intervals. This is enough of a gap for each new novel by this much-lauded writer to feel like an event. His 2011 novel ‘The Stranger’s Child’ was a long ambitious story spanning a period of time from the First World War to close to the present day. In chronicling the transition of time, he charted how the reputation of a poem and its poet transform over many years and subsequent generations. In this new novel ‘The Sparsholt Affair’ Hollinghurst has adopted a similar narrative strategy that’s slightly more compressed spanning The Second World War to close to the present day. The story begins with a literary club in Oxford and the infatuation some members have for a sexually-appealing conventionally-masculine young man named David Sparsholt who is intent on enlisting in military service and settling down into a traditional marriage to his sweetheart. The subsequent sections leap forward in time to show the legacy of portraits and sexual scandal in a circumscribed social world of British society. In doing so, Hollinghurst creates a fascinating depiction of how reality doesn’t change but the frame around it and the way we view it significantly alters over time. In particular, the novel focuses on how views on homosexuality have evolved to alter the way in which individuals perceive themselves and negotiate their public identity as well as their sexual desire. It’s a tale that develops a unique power with its rich accumulation of detail and gains momentum as time slides forward to show the complexity of characters’ relationships and their legacies.

Read my full review of The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst on LonesomeReader

[Latkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is similar in structure to Hollinghurst's last one, The Stranger's Child, in that it jumps forward through time in each part. It tells the tale of David Sparsholt and his son Johnny from the Second World War to the present day. It begins with Freddie Green's account of David's arrival at Oxford University in 1940, and how his fine physique inspired an obsession in his gay friend Evert Dax. It moves forward to the 1960s, when the Sparsholt family - David, his wife Connie and their teenage son Johnny - are on holiday in Cornwall, and Johnny has an unfulfilled desire for his French friend Bastien. Then we encounter Johnny again, in the 1970s, when he has moved to London to become a painter and has fallen in with his father's old friends, including Freddie and Evert. The shadow of 'The Sparsholt Affair' - an unspecified scandal involving David, homosexuality and corruption - hangs over him. I won't go into the rest of the plot, but we end up in the present day.

This is a very enjoyable and engrossing novel about two men's lives, and that of their friends and relations. Despite being father and son, and both being gay or, in David's case, bisexual, they struggle to really know each other. It also charts the differences in attitude towards homosexuality through the years. But it's also about family, love and ageing. It reminded me a little of John Boyne's The Heart's Invisible Furies - if you enjoyed that, I think you'd like this too.

[Jaclyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

How does Hollinghurst do it? He writes a 450-page book in which not much happens despite the passage of time and yet he manages to fill it with small and not so small moments, all perfectly captured and characters you can’t help but care deeply about. His main preoccupation with this novel is time; both the passing of it and societal changes. It’s stunning. My first five-star read of 2018.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having loved, “The Stranger’s Child,” I was looking forward to Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel. “The Sparsholt Affair,” shares a lot in common with that, previous novel. It takes us through a fairly long period – from 1940’s Oxford to the present – and involves a number of inter-weaving characters.

The beginning contains more than a nod to Evelyn Waugh, with the storyline narrated by a young man named Freddie Green. Freddie is the member of a club, which invites authors to come to read to them. Two of his friends, artist, Peter Goyle, and Evert Dax, the son of a novelist, A.V. Dax, are both entranced by the sight of a new student – David Sparsholt. Sharsholt is definitely not one of Green’s set – he is an engineer, a rower, a sportsman, from the Midlands and a different social sphere, and class. He wants to join the war. He has a woman, named Connie… Still, for both Goyle and Evert, it is love – or, at least, lust - at first sight and Freddie tells the story of their obsession.

Some years later, we hear of David Sparsholt again, now married to Connie and with a young son, Johnny. It is through Johnny that the rest of the novel unfolds – at first in 1966, then during the early Seventies, with Johnny discovering Evert Dax, and his contemporaries, and becoming involved with them. Later, we see Johnny with a settled partner, and a daughter, and then, later, as an older man. However, although it is through Johnny’s eyes that the majority of the novel is seen, it is David Sparsholt who is central to the narrative.

The ‘Sparsholt Affair,’ of the title relates to a scandal, which we never learn the details of, but the shadow of which lays over the entire novel. Johnny spends much time confronting characters who bring it up; sometimes tactfully, sometimes not. You feel that an older Evert Dax, and his friends, are as intrigued by David Sparsholt’s son as Johnny is with them. As we progress through the lives of the characters, their relationships and inter-weaving lives.

I really enjoyed this. I listened to the audio version and it is beautifully read, with David Dawson managing to give every character a perfectly, recognisable voice. One of my problems with this novel though, was that the beginning was so brilliant, the rest of the novel just had too much to live up too. The sense of besotted love - young, romantic ideals – within the beautiful city of Oxford is just so gorgeous that it would be hard to follow. However, this is beautifully written, wonderfully read and I enjoyed it very much.

[Gregory Baird · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a condition where I want to like Alan Hollinghurst's writing more than I actually do. The Line of Beauty was fine, but my opinion of it was helped by a BBC adaptation that smoothed out a lot of the areas I found problematic in the book itself--namely that there was something inaccessible about it. I always felt like I was observing the action at a great remove. 

That problem is exacerbated in The Sparsholt Affair, in which Hollinghurst seems to be deliberately making his novel difficult to engage with. Ostensibly, it's a decades-spanning saga about the changing attitudes regarding homosexuality after World War II with the starting point being an affair (natch) between the titular Sparsholt and the nervous gay student who is obsessed with him. The story is told in fragments that intentionally keep us at a remove from Sparsholt and his brief lover. Instead of focusing on either of them, the segment is narrated by a friend at college with only a slight interest in how the obsession plays out.

Just as things are getting interesting, we move forward in time, this time to focus on Sparsholt's son--an adolescent struggling with his own sexuality--so Sparsholt is once again at a remove from the reader, moving on the periphery of his son's story to pursue a suspiciously close friendship with another man. And once again, as soon as we are on the brink of a big moment, Hollinghurst moves on to the next segment. 

This is how things go: Hollinghurst provides agonizingly slow set-up, then denies you any of the payoff. His structure also feels unnecessarily complicated. The Sparsholt Affair is not a novel you can casually read on the subway, it's one that requires you to engage with it. There is nothing wrong with that on its own, but when Hollinghurst keeps teasing you and then denying you satisfaction, and when he deliberately makes his characters inaccessible to you, it just feels irritating. 

For more reviews, check out my blog.

[Beata · Rating 3 out of 5]

have only started it but being an admirer of Alan Hollinghurst I can already say that his latest novel does not disappoint. Perfect atmosphere and characters, just like with his other novels.

[Claire Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very similar in structure to The Stranger's Child, I loved this as much as I loved that, and The Line of Beauty, and The Swimming Pool library. Not an awful lot happens, although many years pass, but these are fairly ordinary lives. I just love how Hollinghurst writes, how he gets the tiny nuances of relationships: one man wanting another, who doesn't really love him back.
I was lucky enough to get my hands on a proof copy, and I'm going to see Hollinghurst speak in October.