The Sparsholt Affair

October 1, 2017

The winner of Man Booker, Somerset Maugham, James Tait, and E.M. Forster honors and a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his recent The Stranger's Child, Hollinghurst returns with a rich evocation of one man's impact on family and friends over seven decades. It opens at 1940s Oxford, where dynamic David Sparsholt has succeeded in charming Evert Dax, the solitary son of a famed novelist, and moves through Sparsholt holidays in Cornwall, offbeat gatherings at the Dax household, the experiences of David's son Johnny in the 1970s London art world, and the increasing openness of gay life during that time.

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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.

January 1, 2018
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.

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Starred review from January 1, 2018
It begins in the early years of WWII at Oxford, where a quartet of friends are spending their last days as students before joining the conflict. They are Freddie Green, a budding memoirist; Peter Coyle, a would-be artist; Evert Dax, whose father is a famous author; and beautiful David Sparsholt. The novel, notable for its sophistication, then follows the lives of the four over the course of decades, concluding in the near present. Freddie will become a writer, as willlike his fatherEvert; Peter will die early in the war, while David will found a wildly successful engineering and manufacturing firm. A very public indiscretion will become known as the Sparsholt Affair and give the novel its title. In the meantime, David and his wife have a son, Johnny, who will grow up to become a successful portraitist and the protagonist of the later parts of the novel. Their brilliantly realized milieu is the world of art and literature and, for Evert and Johnny, who are gay, the evolving world of gay society and culture in Britain. Superlatives are made to describe this extraordinary work of fiction; characterization, style, mood, tone, settingall are equally distinguished. Hollinghurst is especially good at evoking yearning, and, indeed, his novel will inarguably leave his readers yearning for more.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)