The Sparsholt Affair
A novel
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4.1 • 72 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In 1940, the handsome, athletic, and charismatic David Sparsholt arrives at Oxford University to study engineering, 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. Spanning three generations, The Sparsholt Affair plumbs the ways the friendship between these two men will influence their lives—and the lives of others’—for decades to come. Richly observed and emotionally charged, this is a dazzling novel of fathers and sons, of family and legacy, and of the longing for permanence amid life’s inevitable transience.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Both an elliptical character study and a droll comedy of manners, The Sparsholt Affair makes you do a little work at first, but it more than repays you for the effort. At Oxford, under blackout in the early days of World War II, two school chums become equally obsessed with a new student, David Sparsholt. A couple of decades later, David’s teenage son, Johnny, is coming to terms with his own sexuality, while his father’s name is being sullied by a scandal people are calling “the Sparsholt Affair.” What exactly happened is never explicit, like so much else in this deliberately fragmented, episodic novel. In five sections spanning seven decades, Alan Hollinghurst circles around key moments in Johnny’s life and gay culture in Britain as a whole. The result is sly, witty, and ultimately fascinating.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
