The Sparsholt Affair

by Alan Hollinghurst

Hardcover, 2018

Status

Available

Call number

FICT-G Holl

Genres

General Fiction

Collection

Michael C. Weidemann LGBT Library at Gay City

Publication

Knopf (2018), 432 pages

Description

"From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Man Booker Prize, a masterly new novel that spans seven transformative decades in England--from the 1940s to the present--as it plumbs the richly complex relationships of a remarkable family. In 1940, David Sparsholt arrives at Oxford to study engineering, though his sights are set on joining the Royal Air Force. Handsome, athletic, charismatic, he is unaware of his effect on others--especially on Evert Dax, the lonely son of a celebrated novelist who is destined to become a writer himself. With the world at war, and the Blitz raging in London, Oxford nevertheless exists at a strange remove: a place of fleeting beauty--and secret liaisons. A friendship develops between these two young men that will have unexpected consequences as the novel unfolds. Alan Hollinghurst's new novel explores the legacy of David Sparsholt across three generations, on friends and family alike; we experience through its characters changes in taste, morality, and private life in a sequence of vividly rendered episodes: a Sparsholt holiday in Cornwall; eccentric social gatherings at the Dax family home; the adventures of David's son Johnny, a painter in 1970s London; the push and pull in a group of friends brought together by art, literature, and love. And evoking the increasing openness of gay life, The Sparsholt Affair becomes a meditation on human transience, even as it poignantly expresses the longing for permanence and continuity"--… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member thorold

The members of a literary group, meeting in Freddie Green's rooms in Christ Church one day in 1940, catch sight of an unbelievably attractive young man exercising in a room opposite. He turns out to be David Sparsholt, marking time in Oxford until he is old enough to be called up into the RAF, and

two members of the group set out in pursuit of him immediately. One of them gets David to pose for a picture, the other - if Freddie is to be believed - actually gets to have his evil way with him, which is surprising, as David has a bona fide girlfriend in tow...

Some 25 years later, the English newspapers are full of the latest gay sex scandal, the "Sparsholt Affair". Hollinghurst amuses himself by never quite telling us what this particular scandal was about. We know that there was an MP and a property developer involved, and that David Sparsholt went to prison, so we are obviously supposed to imagine it as a kind of composite of Montague, Profumo and Poulson. Part of the point seems to be that we are unlikely to remember any of those real scandals from the 50s and 60s more clearly than Hollinghurst's characters do - whenever Sparsholt's son, Johnny, our main viewpoint character for the last three-quarters of the book, introduces himself to someone, the name gets a flicker of recognition and "Wasn't that...?", but no-one really knows.

Just as he was in The stranger's child, Hollinghurst is spectacularly good at catching the tone of the periods in which the book is set (1940, the late-sixties/early seventies, the nineties and 2012, in this case) - so good in fact that we can't really see his technique working at all, and it doesn't feel like a historical novel, more like a collection of contemporary documents. He's obviously trying to get away from the very literary plot of his last book by making Johnny a visual artist who doesn't read much (he has dyslexia, but when he went to school "it was called being thick"). So instead of a novel populated by upper-class metropolitan poetry-queens we have a novel populated by upper-class metropolitan art-queens! But there's more to it than that, of course. It's also a book that explores how perceptions of gay sexuality have evolved over the years. There's a lot of beautiful detail along the way, and a running joke about how Johnny in the 2010s still has to keep painfully coming out of the closet as a vegetarian in every new social encounter, whilst no-one cares in the least whether or not he's gay any more. I know the feeling! But it's also demonstrating - with odd echoes of Armistead Maupin - how an LGBT family-saga is not a contradiction in terms.

An excellent novel. But so good technically that it's almost difficult to see what it's doing beyond creating illusion.

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LibraryThing member NeilDalley

What I love most about Hollinghurst's poetic writing is his ability to enter deeply into a scene or into a character. There is a sense of immersement. And so the problem for me with this book is that really there are several stories separated by years between them so that there is a shock when you

move from one period section to the next. You are pulled out of your immersion into a particular world and dropped into a new scene with the old characters acting as your link. This seems for me, as a reader, a shame when I was enjoying so much the place into which I was immersed. I was sorry therefore that the wartime Oxford section didn't last longer and that 1960s London didn't last longer. I realise that it is a technique that Hollinghurst has used before (in Stranger's Child for example) but I think I miss the sense of depth that the focussed Folding Star was able to achieve by being about one story. In a way then The Sparsholt Affiar is rather like a series of inter-connected short stories. I like short stories but a prefer a full length novel.

One can't help feeling that either as Hollinghurst's writing matures, or my understanding of his style grows, that a lot of the novel is an out-working of his own obsessions. The bookish, slightly effete gay man gets the beyond hot straight man more easily into bed than anyone could have imagined. The older gay man is surprised be the attentions of an amorous beautiful young man. The man in his sixties loving the thrill of clubbing where he happens to pick up a young Brazilian stud.

Nevertheless, there is some beautiful writing and this was a thoroughly good read. And the story certainly drives you on to want more. There is much to think about and savour.

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LibraryThing member alexrichman

I groaned when I found out this was yet another story about posh gay men at Oxford... so imagine my surprise when that was the best bit! The character we end up spending the most time with is nowhere near as fun as those from the start, and the titular Sparsholt seems to undergo a.complete

personality transplant between each section. Very disappointing!

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LibraryThing member thiscatsabroad

I aborted into the 3rd timeframe. I don´t remember reading anything so ponderously pretentious that hadn´t been written before 1938. For the record, I wanted to like this, but in the end I decided that lide was really too short.

LibraryThing member DrFuriosa

This is an elegantly plotted and conceived novel about how our youth follows us and affects the future generations. The novel starts with Evert Dax and Peter Coyle's rivalry over soon-to-be soldier David Sparsholt. And then it shifts and unfolds over a 60-year or more period, in which we see the

ripples of relationships out of this college circle. Hollinghurst writes well, and this is one of his best, in my opinion.

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LibraryThing member carole888fort

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada, Knopf Canada and NetGalley for providing me with an advance copy of The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst in exchange for an honest review. Let me begin by saying that Hollinghurst's prose, although at times fragmented, proves to be beautiful and

nothing short of exquisite. The reader can imagine being there. This novel covers a period of roughly 70 years in the life of fathers and sons, from WWII to the present. The first part finds one of the main characters, David Sparsholt, at Oxford where he attracts much attention from his entourage. I loved these 100 pages and was excited about reading the rest but I found it difficult to sort out. The titular "affair" is never fully explained but seems to hover in the background a great deal of the time. Art and homosexuality are frequent and important threads but relationships of fathers and sons are foremost. Hollinghurst is the Man Booker Prize winner for 2004 for The Line of Beauty. I would certainly like to read more of this author's work.

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LibraryThing member dbsovereign

Hollinghurst has a way of engaging the reader with either the soft and low-key or in subtle and intangible ways...[in progress]

LibraryThing member nivramkoorb

This is the 3rd book I have read by Alan Hollinghurst and "The Line of Beauty" is the best and one that I recommend to anyone who has not read him. This book has his trademark excellent prose and description. He is a master of description and getting into the subtle nuances of any social situation.

This book covers over 70 years and deals with characters that are mostly gale and mostly male. You see the changes over the years towards gay life and also the English social class issues. I did find it surprising that a book that had sexual desire as a major theme did not address the HIV/Aids situation. I found that at 417 pages that a book without a compelling plot tended to be a slow go. If you like great prose, then you may like it but I recommend "The Line of Beauty" as your introduction to Hollinghurst.

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LibraryThing member bklynbiblio

I rarely read reviews of novels that I know I will read eventually, but I wonder if in this case I might have been prepared and thus understood more what this book was about before diving into it. I'm not disappointed in the book--on the contrary, it's a lusciously-literary, Victorian-like gay

novel, a mashup of Henry James and George Eliot in a way, minus, respectively, the one's psychological meanderings or the other's morality.

I was expecting something more concrete, around which the lives of the approximately 75 years of events unfold for David, Evert, Johnny, Ivan, Lucy, and a bevy of other characters, gay or otherwise, who appear throughout this novel. In Hollinghurst's last book, "The Stranger's Child," the story revolved around a poem and how it was recounted and reinterpreted over time, so here I kept looking for that linchpin, and it was only after the book was done that I realized it was there, but not in the form of a thing, but an action, an event. In a way, the success of the plot of "Sparsholt" is what is not there, and the beautifully lyrical writing that recounts how the characters act and react around this over the decades.

It is a slow novel and takes time to read and absorb, but you do get caught up in it and in the lives of the characters, to the point that you mourn those who pass on when you meet them again 20, 40, or more years later. The fact that the protagonist (if we can call him that), Johnny, is a portrait painter plays out beautifully as well, as an observer and participant in life (his life and others' lives). His awareness of beauty in art and nature and people only enhances the reader's respect for his personal anxieties. I recommend the book if one wants to absorb oneself in a contemporary novelist's poetic, paced writing.

Case in point: here is one of the exquisite passages to luxuriate in, on page 288 of the paperback edition. Johnny has taken in the street scene and Thames embankment in Chelsea London, then goes back to look at a painting by James McNeill Whistler on the wall: "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 the mist. Well, it was genius, and he smiled round at the women, who were looking at each other steadily through Fran's cigarette smoke."

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LibraryThing member amandanan

4.5 stars. The multiple narrator thing confused me a time or two but really loved the 7 decade story arc. If you’re looking to broaden your horizons with reading, this is LGBTQ.

LibraryThing member proustitute

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.

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LibraryThing member robfwalter

There is so much to like about Alan Hollinghurst novels. There’s the flawless prose, witty, crystal clear and wonderfully paced, with just enough detail to make each scene last just as long as it should. There’s the gay characters, who are fleshed out and complex and don’t spend a minute

longer in the closet than they have to, which is such a breath of fresh air when so much gay literature is about the oppression of the closet or the torment of first emerging from it. There’s the sense of profundity given to ordinary moments, an ability to tell a bigger story just by describing a staircase or relating a conversation where what has not been said is more important than what has.

But what varies in Hollinghurst’s novels is the bigger stuff – plot and characterisation. In this I feel that The Sparsholt Affair falls a little bit short of his best stuff (The Line of Beauty and The Swimming Pool Library being the standouts in my recollection). Some of the characters weren’t that interesting and some of them were more interesting than I realised until near the end when they were retrospectively fleshed out. And the plot seems to meander in places – there are sections which don’t seem to tie in at all to the bigger themes of the book.

I suspect that Hollinghurst novels are a bit like Murakami novels and Austin Powers movies – you prefer the first one you encounter because they’re so stylistically distinct that the novel shock of pleasure can’t ever quite be recaptured. Having said that, the gorgeous prose and ability to tackle big emotions with refreshingly ordinary gay lives will keep me reading every book that he publishes.

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