The Sparsholt Affair is an encyclopedia of gay desire. It’s sensitive, lyrical, very English, London-centric, takes plenty of chances and it’s the gay novel that I wish straight people would read. The kind of music that Hollinghurst says isn’t listened to anymore seems the music of choice for many of the older characters, who are known to put on vinyl of Mahler or Prokofiev. The Sparsholt Affair reads like a Ralph Vaughan Williams symphony sounds. It’s mellow and it roars.
At Oxford during World War II, David Sparsholt is turning heads among the closeted gays. He’s only at Oxford temporarily until his RAF assignment comes through, although he could be admitted if he wished.
David is caught with his girlfriend in his room and is fined. It’s a fine he can’t pay, so he accepts money from Evert, an affluent gay student who’s besotted with him. It’s not quite a quid pro quo, Hollinghurst is too subtle for that. But in return for the financial help, David sleeps with Evert. Later, he sends Evert a note with the symbols for alpha and omega on it, meaning, first and last time.
It’s an ethical transgression that kickstarts the novel. Sparsholt will use his male beauty several times like an assault weapon to get what he wants from vulnerable men. Is he gay or maybe bisexual? We don’t know. Otherwise he seems very conventional. He doesn’t like art, books or music. He loves sports and is very athletic. He’s an engineer, a buttoned-up 1950’s guy. He does enter into straight marriage arrangements, twice, and does have a son, Johnny, who is very different from him. Johnny is a painter who in contrast to his father is explicitly gay.
It’s a challenge to convey how English this novel is. Friends who meet in their student days at Oxford will know each other, or know of each other, for the rest of their lives. Three generations are chronicled, starting with the group of Oxford students in the 1940’s. There are also filaments of relations that extend earlier than the 1940’s and hints of stories to come past the third generation that stretches early into the 21st century. It’s a narrative history spanning over 50 years.
The Sparsholt Affair is a post-Victorian novel with a very large cast of characters meshing elaborate plot lines. Its concerns are ethical and an attempt to display a multigenerational span of the gay diaspora. There are central characters who you will meet in youth and as seniors. Balanced as on a golden scale; there’s such a finesse in the telling, is the relationship between David and his son Johnny. And Hollinghurst grants us a Miss Havisham-like reunion between David and Evert as aging seniors to bookmark their one-night-stand as students that opened the novel.
Victorian novels lend themselves to serialization. Many started out that way. That’s not quite true of The Sparsholt Affair, which despite its length is much more concentrated with incident. It’s as jam-packed as a mature Verdi opera. Blink and you might miss a character. A weakness? Are some characters dropped too swiftly? I don’t know. Writing this way takes balls.
When Johnny as a distinguished painter has his subjects sit for portrait sessions, he plays classical. Vinyl, I presume, suits the temper of this novel. If the sitter likes classical, the music weaves its spell. But if the sitter can’t relate, then they will talk through it, which is also fine with the painter.
The Sparsholt Affair limns its own music. Sometimes that music is as faint as the echoes from an Elgar recessional as characters’ lives seem to shadow each other through meandering story paths. Sometimes it’s as blatant as drugged dancers fucking in a club restroom. You are free to dance with the music or to let it get past you.
