Although the story is different, the structure of this book reminded me a lot of the last Hollinghurst I read, The Stranger's Child. At the core there's the lived experience of one person, but that person remains in the shadows while others live their lives in the centre, and keep coming against the unknowable core but getting their own impressions and reflections of it. There's also the frequently awkward relationship Johathan has with his father David, and how people of certain age seem to be interested in him only because of it. ( )

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.
( )

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. ( )

Llegué al libro a través de una recomendación y me ha gustado mucho la arquitectura literaria que propone el autor para plantear la misma temática, a través de la mirada de diferentes personajes en distintas épocas. ( )

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. ( )