Book review: The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954, so he is now in his mid-60s. It is well to remember this when you read The Sparsholt Affair. Like The Line of Beauty, the book that won Hollinghurst the Man Booker prize back in 2004, The Sparsholt Affair is a long and densely detailed novel. Also like the earlier novel, this one is intimately concerned with gay life and society. But Hollinghurst is older, and there's now a stronger sense of mortality and the decaying effects of time. Where this novel goes is almost elegiac. The structure is like a generational saga, with each long section set in the different time period. In 1940, young David Sparsholt appears briefly at Oxford University before going off to fight in the Air Force. Adored by all the (closeted) homosexuals on campus, this muscular athlete is engaged to be married and appears to be strictly heterosexual. But is he? The first 90 pages of the novel – a full novella in themselves – keep us in a sort of suspense. Continue reading at 'Stuff'

[ Stuff | 2017-11-04 00:00:00 UTC ]

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Book review: The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst

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