...the immense assurance of the writing, the deep knowledge of the settings and periods in which the story unfolds, the mingling of cruel humour and lyrical tenderness, the insatiable interest in human desire from its most refined to its most brutally carnal, grip you as tightly as any thriller ... It’s a wonderful structural device, this layering of similar situations on top of each other like a series of transparencies that cumulatively portray a culture as it exists in time as well as in space ... An amazing amount of the passion and folly of the human comedy is woven into his modest life, all of it beautifully observed and memorably articulated. It makes for a looser, freer book than the cunning puzzle of a novel one was led to expect, and almost certainly a better one, too.
Hollinghurst's sixth novel is epic, elegant, and intricately constructed ... As we've come to expect from the Booker-winning author of The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst builds an intricate web of relationships with stately Jamesian precision and nuance. The Sparsholt Affair is filled with what Johnny, describing some Whistler paintings, calls 'small miracles of observation' ... Hollinghurst, who has tread the line between satire and sentiment in all his novels, understands that the truth lies somewhere in between, and knows how tricky it can be to find the right balance. In The Sparsholt Affair, he has tilted toward the heartfelt, to moving effect.
Hollinghurst wonderfully conveys the subtle, charged atmosphere of ordinary life rumbling along under extraordinary circumstances ... we don’t really find out what David Sparsholt has to say about his gay son, or what the son has to say about his father. It is almost as if Hollinghurst, sympathetic to Johnny’s introverted awkwardness and wanting him to flourish on his own terms, believes the question to be impolite. As David and his cohort recede from view, Johnny becomes the novel’s protagonist, though he has the provisional feel of a secondary character nudged from the wings into the spotlight ... Hollinghurst has further handicapped himself by limiting Johnny’s ability with words. He is dyslexic, and not much of a talker, though in place of verbal gifts he has visual ones ... considering the effects of the past is not just the responsibility of a novel about eight decades of gay history; it is the responsibility of a novel about family, and the disappointment of The Sparsholt Affair is that Hollinghurst lets Johnny slip the knot of his father’s life with barely a second thought, escaping easily into the safety of his own.
These themes are slowly layered and mingled throughout the ornately rendered table talk and passing encounters that make up Mr. Hollinghurst’s novel, and it must be said that his gradualist approach will not be to everyone’s taste. The opening section can feel particularly trying ... Mr. Hollinghurst asks the reader to practice the perhaps antiquarian virtue of bearing with him, like a sitter for a portrait, as he gives his canvas shading and depth ... Those who do will have their patience handsomely rewarded. The novel’s confident passage through the decades traces both a satisfying and touchingly hopeful life’s trajectory for Johnny ... The restraint and narrative control by which Mr. Hollinghurst sustains the mystery that surrounds this figure is the novel’s signal accomplishment.
This may be fiction, but it is an authentic story of fully-drawn personalities that are often flawed, in their very human way, but never boring. This is another device that Hollinghurst uses effectively here, better than any working author today, he tells real stories about characters he’s realized so fully, you’d swear that they lived and drew breath. Hollinghurst has been long and short listed for all the major awards, winning several, and no less can be expected of this extraordinary new effort.
There is something so old-fashioned about Alan Hollinghurst’s novels they feel almost transgressive. All those characters, all that plot; the passage of time and the weight of history—Hollinghurst is so far from the contemporary ideal of cool that to witness the excitement that attends the publication of his novels is reassuring ... The Sparsholt Affair is more than an ingenious contraption, and it spoils nothing to talk about it as a work that looks at its themes—time, art, beauty, family, joy—through the lens of sex...Hollinghurst has always been interested in sex as an essential aspect of homosexuality, but Sparsholt is more gleefully erotic than his previous work, which is maybe the novel’s very point. Sex, pleasure, and beauty are fundamental to human life, or Hollinghurst is uninterested in an existence that doesn’t celebrate the three.
...as accomplished and pleasurable as anything he has written ... The Sparsholt Affair, like Hollinghurst’s previous novel The Stranger’s Child, is a multi-generational portrait of gay life in the 20th century. What’s new is the way in which Hollinghurst makes these themes seem satisfyingly ambiguous and open-ended ... We are all the unreliable narrators of our own lives, Hollinghurst’s method implies, and it’s often what’s left out that’s most important.
Readers of that book [The Stranger's Child] will find much that is familiar here, stylistically and thematically. As always, Hollinghurst writes classically beautiful prose, which like James’s is constantly intelligent, alert and mobile. Though he is a wonderful noticer and describer — of skies, paintings, bodies — it is his party scenes that are most famous, and justly so. Few writers are so good at capturing the currents of intention and emotion that circulate in a crowded room ... The times allow him possibilities his father could never have dreamed of, and Hollinghurst — who belongs to the same generation as Johnny — writes with subtlety and sympathy about all the stages of his progress ... As the story moves forward in time, Hollinghurst achieves the kind of symphonic effect we normally associate with much longer books, like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time ... By the end of the novel, the mystery of David Sparsholt hasn’t quite been solved, but it has served its purpose — as the absent center of a beautiful and complex design.
Hollinghurst wants you to have an all-encompassing sense of your surroundings: the light, the furnishings, the ambient chatter, the furtive eye contact and body language of everyone partaking in the scene. But while his surfaces are elaborate, he keeps you guessing at what’s happening beneath them ... The novel’s study of how a single sensational event reverberates across the decades has slightly less depth than Hollinghurst’s brilliant tracking of how an extravagant and carnal creature becomes mere archival material in The Stranger’s Child. Still, Hollinghurst’s mellifluous prose is as fine and subtly shaded as ever, and his full, persuasive immersion of the reader in the book’s far-flung eras is impeccable.
I felt qualified admiration for Hollinghurst’s luxuriant descriptions of moods, rooms, art objects, and social nuances of queer past times, but listlessness too. Across four sections moving from 1940s Oxford to mid-90s London, becoming immersed in the lives of his numerous characters (or moved by them) rarely occurred. Hollinghurst chronicles an arty, privileged network of friends and lovers ... a sobering reminder about conformity and prices paid during inequitable eras.
...the novel overwhelms the scandal with the minor dramas of closely observed lives, rendered in a prose of consistently astonishing refinement. We’re left with a sensational hole at the center of a deviously anti-sensational nove ... Hollinghurst manages a time-lapse impressionist portrait of London bohemian life. The way life opens up to Johnny in a way that it never could for his father — who remains owner of his own firm after scandal and prison wrecks his marriage to Connie and he marries his dour secretary — is the novel’s real subject, though Hollinghurst has decided to look at it every which way but head-on.
Hollinghurst writes long, absorbing, much-peopled novels that display a masterly grasp of psychological processes and a prickling awareness of minute betrayals and inarticulate desires. His sensibilities are so fine you sense he can detect a pea beneath 20 mattresses when it comes to failures of tact, poise and discernment ... Of course the sex writing is good. Sometimes it’s brutal, other times fond and funny ... The truth about The Sparsholt Affair is that it is not among this writer’s more successful novels. It is intricately patterned on the sentence level yet moves tentatively, at the rate of afternoon sunlight creeping across a floor ... You feel you are watching impeccable B-roll or a John le Carré novel without bad guys or an important work of theater as seen from 300 yards away. Your mind rates this book rather highly; your heart gives it only two stars. You come to regard it with respect but not ecstasy.
For readers new to his work, its frankness about sex might be unnerving; more formidable still is his decision to create expectations of important, even crowning revelations — about important events and the characters’ involvements in them — without ever entirely fulfilling them ... Thin smiles and ellipses, and later barely but definitely moved Venetian blinds, suggesting someone has just seen something not meant to be seen, suggest a great deal and build expectations of exposure that are answered only partially ... a phrase that suggests Hollinghurst’s commanding position, only strengthened by his latest novel, as a very contemporary English writer deeply formed by the tradition: When asked why, despite his successful career as an artist, Johnny never painted a portrait of his father, he explains, 'We never really knew each other, . . . what with everything.'
Hollinghurst's literary hero Henry James once said that a writer must be one on whom nothing is lost, a phrase that hints at what makes Hollinghurst so extraordinary. He's simply brilliant at capturing the nuance textures of life ... Jean-Paul Sartre once claimed that the greatest art is about the passing of time. And whether Hollinghurst is showing the decades-long erosion of repressive values or the flowering and slow fading of his characters, this magisterial novel offers evidence that Sartre was right.
As one would expect of Hollinghurst, the greatest prose stylist writing in English today, this is a book full of glorious sentences, perhaps his most beautiful novel yet ... This is an unashamedly readable novel, one that goes out of its way to please; indeed it feels occasionally like Hollinghurst is trying to house all the successful elements of his previous books under the roof of one novel. It’s funnier, more warm-hearted, less waspish than any of his books so far, but still undoubtedly the work of a master.
Robust pleasure lies on nearly every page of Alan Hollinghurst’s novels, including his sixth and latest, The Sparsholt Affair. Turns of phrase, paragraphs, whole scenes deserve to be read a second time ... Brilliant out of the gate and energetically rendered in a wonderful final section, The Sparsholt Affair sags in the middle. Big time jumps, narrative gaps and a large cast make it a chore to track who’s who and which decade we are in. We don’t mind doing some heavy lifting, so long as there’s a payoff, but enticing early characters and plot lines are abandoned entirely, sometimes replaced by stories less appealing ... Despite being sometimes blocky and circuitous, The Sparsholt Affair uses its big time span wonderfully to contrast the secretive, mostly hidden and shameful same-sex encounters of David with Johnny’s life in a much more open gay culture. The novel has intriguing things to say about changing father-son relationships. I wish it had said more.
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, setting—all are equally distinguished. Hollinghurst is especially good at evoking yearning, and, indeed, his novel will inarguably leave his readers yearning for more.
Many of its characters stay doggedly out of focus. It’s far more assured as a work of historical fiction than it is when it moves into the last few decades; despite moments of power, it never quite coheres ... In its later stages The Sparsholt Affair becomes an odd object. It is overwhelmingly sad but its pointed use of time’s diminutions is not rendered as poignantly as in The Stranger’s Child ... But his unparalleled gift for observation sustains this novel where its plot and mission jag.
In every one of Hollinghurst’s major novels, he begins with this romantic vision of a gay, aristo-ish Englishman. Some readers might like this sort of tweedy fantasy, but to me it smacks of Downton Abbey and its peddler of nostalgia, Julian Fellowes ... Hollinghurst affirms his place as a stylist who breaks out, every time, from the prison of his book’s openings. The joy he takes in life’s small shards of beauty don’t feel like a wordsmith’s performance but instead like the joy of life itself ... Hollinghurst’s oeuvre acts like a bridge for culture, as well. He takes up the gayness of England past and connects it to the gayness of life now. For anyone whose relationship to that past is fraught, or even tortured, Hollinghurst’s books can initially feel stifling. But as the realization dawns a third of the way through that Hollinghurst is on the side of life, not an airless past, the walls start to come down. Time passes and people die. The instants of pure splendor are what make life livable, make it writable. The Sparsholt Affair affirms them, again.
Hollinghurst resolutely avoids detailing the exact nature of the incident. You ache for a big reveal, with some of the lavishly explicit sexual detail that’s a hallmark of Hollinghurst’s fiction. But no fireworks are forthcoming ... despite Hollinghurst’s deliberate, sober indirection, the book is rich with the kind of emotional detail that marks his best work ... Hollinghurst has taken a sizable risk in constructing a narrative whose main character is undefined — or, more precisely, only roughly sketched by others. The novel’s dividends are there, but they’re often subtle ... For all its occasional ponderousness, the main virtue of The Sparsholt Affair is its recognition of the distance between reality and how others perceive it, and how that distance is quite often cavernous.
[T]he quality that stands out in Hollinghurst’s novels, and here again, is the unstrained precision of his prose style, a justness and aptness of description that send happy jolts of recognition through the reader ... Hollinghurst has few equals in the exactness with which he summons up human traits, often with comic brio ... As with so many passages in this novel, everything is perfect here: the scene, the visual truth, the pacing, the mood, and, not least, the author’s kindly touch.
Hollinghurst has a tendency to use dialogue too obviously to convey background information, but the Jamesian elegance and psychological acuity of his previous novels grace The Sparsholt Affair as well. This is a moving work from one of modern literature’s finest authors.
Hollinghurst claims Henry James as his great influence. Like James, he finds the gradations of taste and class, the shifting balance of power between individuals as they gradually and sometimes inadvertently reveal themselves to each other, fascinating. Unlike James, he’s not inclined to circle these observations with an infinite delicacy. His fiction delivers the frisson of witnessing such a rarefied sensibility expressing itself directly to the subjects of sex and social power ... The Sparsholt Affair lacks the sturdy momentum of Hollinghurst’s masterpiece, The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Booker Prize ... But like all of Hollinghurst’s novels this one is still a wonder, full of wit and tenderness, rendered in prose of unostentatious, classic beauty. There is no better English stylist alive.
...part of Hollinghurt’s 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.
From the first pages, it’s clear that Hollinghurst is still writing some of the most beautiful lines currently to be found in English ... But this very mastery seems to have misled him; he seems to think he no longer needs to obey the fundamental rules of narrative ... The mood is sun-drunk, horny, and inescapably twee, giving the reader a sense of subliminally listening to the world’s most elegantly wrought Belle and Sebastian song ... if we knew these people better, or cared about what they did, we’d care a lot more when they started to decline and die.
