![]() Then the novel jumps ahead a few more years, and Johnny, now a successful portraitist, has both a life partner (later to become his husband) and a daughter via a sperm donation to the aforementioned lesbians. He befriends a posh young lesbian couple who bring him to his first gay club, has a few glorious but transitory trysts with random men, and longs for coupledom. Johnny, now an aspiring painter working for an art restorer, is taken up by his father’s old friend Evert and a coterie of writers and artists who hang around Evert’s house in Chelsea. Hollinghurst resumes the story a few years later, after the scandal, in ’70s London. Evert’s crush results in a connection that will, without Johnny’s knowledge, shape his life. The artist’s encounter with David produces a red-chalk sketch of the nude undergraduate Adonis, minus an identifiable face-a drawing that will wend its way through the novel and end up in unlikely hands. One of the would-be seducers, a rakish artist, claims to have “had” David the other, Evert Dax, the son of an intimidating novelist known for his “dense, unfashionable but not insignificant writings,” pines pitiably. Freddie, who’s straight, takes a mother-hen interest in the designs two of his friends have on the new boy, although he doubts their prospects given that Sparsholt has a fiancée. One fateful night, they glimpse through a window the hunky David Sparsholt lifting hand weights in a room across the quad. The Sparsholt Affair begins with the brief memoir of a supporting character, Freddie Green, one of a group of young friends at Oxford in 1940, all of the men on the brink of going to war. Raised in circles where homosexuality was illegal and unspeakable, he lives long enough to sample the offerings of Grindr and to dance at an Ecstasy-fueled rave-then leave in a cab whose driver hands him a bottle of water and asks, “Had a good night, have we?”Īlan Hollingshurst. The Sparsholt Affair-a long, lusciously observant dive into a certain slice of 20 th-century English life-is really about Johnny, a gay man born in 1952. This is dreadful for him, but also for his son Johnny, who for the rest of his life, whenever introduced to anyone new, waits for “the familiar momentary suspicion, and its tactful suppression, and the lingering curiosity, half cunning, half sympathetic, that ensued.” The elder Sparsholt’s feelings about the scandal are never made known to the reader. One of the participants, David Sparsholt, a handsome war hero–turned–real estate developer captured in a notoriously compromising photograph, also has a name and face unusual enough to become forever associated with the scandal. Like the real-life Profumo affair, it involves Tory politicians and the exchange of money for sex, but with a twist: In Hollinghurst’s novel, the sex is between men, which was as illegal as prostitution at that time. The title of Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, The Sparsholt Affair, is the moniker given to a fictional British scandal from the 1960s.
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