"The Sparsholt Affair" by Alan Hollinghurst

An audio book.

Part 1 - Oxford University. World war 2. 3rd year Freddy Green (it's from his PoV) has friends Peter (gay artist) and Evert (gay son of a famous novelist, Dax) who both fancy David Sparsholt, a new 1st year, only 17. David's a rower, an engineer, and engaged to big-breasted Connie. Freddie has a student girl-friend Jill, just a friend. He's comfortable in the company of gays - he went to public school, and his half-brother had slept with Auden. Freddy and his friends are in the Literature Club, and Dax is their next guest speaker. Has Peter drawn Sparsholt in the nude? Sparsholt likes sleeping with men.

Part 2 - David (married to Connie), his schoolfriend Cliff (married to Norma?), David's 14 y.o. arty gay son Johnny (his PoV) and 15.y.o. French Bastian go on a yacht and fish. Johnny and Bastion are sharing sex. Bastion joins Johnny's family on their seaside holiday to improve his English. Johnny's envious when Bastion eyes girls. He overhears Norma and his mother talk with interest about Bastion. They see Freddy on a TV quiz show.

Part 3 - Johnny is now in the arts business, learning about restoration and dealing. He meets Evert and Freddy because his friend Dennis is secretary to Evert, who's writing up his father's life ("the memo[ir] club"). There are several gays in Evert's house, and a nude sketch of Johnny's father (though Johnnny doesn't know that). He's enjoying the sexual freedom and public toilets of London. We learn that 6 years before, his father (a WW2 hero) was involved in a homosexual scandal with an MP, Cliff and male prostitutes. His father had become a pin-up for some gays, a warning to others.

Francesca, who knows Evert's group, asks him out. To his relief she takes him to a lesbian bar then a gay club. It's all new to him. So is the art world. He goes to an auction. Among regular dealers he has to quickly learn the tactics when previewing lots and dealing. It's not so unlike his experience of being amongst gays at social events. Francesca asks him if he'd like to be a sperm donor.

He goes with unfaithful Ivan to Wales for the weekend in a disposable chapter. Ivan likes older men like Evert.

Part 4 - Johnnie's daughter Lucy is 7. This part is rather from her PoV. She tries to understand the world of adults. At funerals we learn more about what happened year ago. She likes art. Johnnie meets his father, introduces him to Evert.

Part 5 - Johnnie is 60. He's commissioned to paint a family, the mother a TV celebrity. We learn about the male gaze and marketing tricks of portraits artists. His husband Pat has died. He goes out to a club for the first time in 20 years. He meets a young guy who likes older men. While in a toilet cubicle together, Johnnie looks at his phone to find his father had died. Next day he visits his step-mother of 30+ years, who he hasn't seen much. When Johnnie goes to see the body, he sketches it. The press have a field day with the obituaries. Because he'd kept the rare family name, he'd never been allowed to forget his father's disgrace. Only now do we learn anything about how it hit Johnnie at the time. Lucy's going to marry a woman.

Veiled conversation suddenly turns to physical sex. Perhaps the slow, evasive style reflects how things were then. We see the different, era-specific ways of coping with being gay. Art helps, whatever the era. Emotions often come paired - "excitement and fear", etc. Lingering glances matter - "Each knew something about the other, since Jill had been there on that evening in first week when we'd watched him half-naked across the quad, and David of course had coaxed certain romantic claims about her from me, so they each had the gleam of being in on a secret or a joke which was possibly disconcerting to the other". A final adverb (e.g. "competently") can twist a sentence. There are lots of little pleasures - what should one do if you're shy and you're with someone who attracts glances?

Other reviews

• James Lasdun (The immediate fun of this section is largely in its reviving of a particular style of fine writing, in which the rarefied pleasures of euphemism and indirectness concerning sexual matters still had a certain currency. It isn’t quite pastiche, more a sort of dead-on rendition ... there is a great scene between father and son at the RAF Club, though it serves mainly to consolidate Sparsholt as an enigma, which isn’t, for me, the most interesting of literary entities. Remarkably, the novel more than survives this slight letdown. What keeps it pulsing is really hard to say, especially as the careful formal patterning of the first three sections is also largely abandoned. It could be simply that, having laid the groundwork for one kind of novel, Hollinghurst found he had the basis for another, better suited to his gifts, which are possibly more those of a chronicler than a plotter. ... 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.)
• Alexandra Schwartz (This kind of determined evasiveness, frequently frustrating for the reader, feels like a new development for Hollinghurst, and I wonder if it is born of a wish to refuse the sorts of major twists and resolutions that he has relied on in the past.)
• Kirkus review
• Laura Miller (The Sparsholt Affair lacks the sturdy momentum of Hollinghurst’s masterpiece, The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Booker Prize. There’s little reason to worry that the likable, yearning, good-looking Johnny won’t fulfill his modest dreams. AIDS goes conspicuously unmentioned. 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.)