The Sparsholt Affair

Starred review from November 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.

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