"From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Man Booker Prize, a masterly new novel that spans seven transformative decades in England--from the 1940s to the present--as it plumbs the richly complex relationships of a remarkable family. In 1940, David Sparsholt arrives at Oxford to study engineering, though his sights are set on joining the Royal Air Force. Handsome, athletic, charismatic, he is 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. With the world at war, and the Blitz raging in London, Oxford nevertheless exists at a strange remove: a place of fleeting beauty--and secret liaisons. A friendship develops between these two young men that will have unexpected consequences as the novel unfolds. Alan Hollinghurst's new novel explores the legacy of David Sparsholt across three generations, on friends and family alike; we experience through its characters changes in taste, morality, and private life in a sequence of vividly rendered episodes: a Sparsholt holiday in Cornwall; eccentric social gatherings at the Dax family home; the adventures of David's son Johnny, a painter in 1970s London; the push and pull in a group of friends brought together by art, literature, and love. And evoking the increasing openness of gay life, The Sparsholt Affair becomes a meditation on human transience, even as it poignantly expresses the longing for permanence and continuity."--
"A multi-generational story of fathers and sons during the second half of the twentieth century in England"--
Alan Hollinghurst writes the British upper classes so well, and especially the dynamic between old money and their interloping friends. There is nothing to fault in his writing ability. I found the focus on portraiture interesting, especially if this book is viewed as a portrait of the portraitist (or perhaps of his mysterious, disgraced father). I also liked the theme of intergenerational communication or lack thereof: most of the relationships in this book (whether romantic, platonic, or familial) have big age gaps, and characters are constantly misunderstanding each other, or saying something other than what they mean, or trailing off. I just didn't find the social dynamics that interesting overall. There is so much that is hinted at but that we never see; most of the action takes place implicitly, which was obviously a deliberate choice but which ends up being quite frustrating. I think the dynamic in Hollinghurst's Booker-winning The Line of Beauty was a lot more interesting: the young gay working class aesthete subsumed into the family of a Conservative MP in the 80s was inherently a more interesting premise. I never felt that I got a good handle on the characters in The Sparsholt Affair; the narrative felt jumpy, and while the faltering relationships between characters were well-written, there was nothing that truly compelled me to keep reading.
