Summary
" Call Me By Your Name meets Evelyn Waugh in a gorgeous novel about the generations-long aftershocks of a youthful tryst." -- Esquire
From the winner of the Man Booker Prize, a masterly novel that spans seven transformative decades as it plumbs the 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 powerful effect on others--especially on Evert Dax, the lonely and romantic 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 exists at a strange remove: a place of fleeting beauty, of secret liaisons under the cover of blackouts. A friendship develops between David and Evert that will influence their lives for decades to come.
Alan Hollinghurst's sweeping new novel evokes across three generations the intimate relationships of a group of friends brought together by art, literature, and love. We witness shifts in taste and morality through a series of vividly rendered episodes: a Sparsholt holiday in Cornwall; eccentric gatherings at the Dax family home; the adventures of David's son Johnny, a painter in 1970s London. Richly observed, emotionally charged, this dazzling novel of fathers and sons, of family and legacy, explores the social and sexual revolutions of the past century, even as it takes us straight to the heart of our current age.
Author Notes
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of the novels The Swimming-Pool Library; The Folding Star; The Spell; The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Stranger's Child . He has also received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He lives in London.
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A man's inability to be honest about his sexuality has scandalous, and brutally public, consequences for several generations.At the outset of this novel, in 1940, all the gay men and at least one straight woman in a literary club at Oxford are infatuated with beautiful David Sparsholt, a first-year engineering student who initially seems oblivious to the attention. One student, Evert Dax, the son of famous, inexplicably bestselling novelist A.V. Dax, is determined to bed Sparsholt. (Ostensibly straight Freddie Green, whose memoir about his years at Oxford makes up the first section of the novel, claims Sparsholt has a "dull square face.") Sparsholt's straight bona fides (he has a girlfriend) soon come into thrilling question. The students watch warily at night for German bombs in the World War II-era opening of the novel, which soon transitions to 1966, when Sparsholt's 14-year-old son, Johnny, lusts after Bastien, a French exchange student who's living with his family. Johnny is the heart of the story, and in the ensuing sections taking place over many decades he gives Hollinghurst the opportunity to track the vast, transformative changes in gay life since David Sparsholt attended Oxford. Johnny is a fascinating character: a painter who is sensitive, proudly bohemian, sometimes rejected in love, and still eager for love at an advanced age, but always calmly aware of who he is and the dangers of trying to be someone else. It's a lesson he learned from his father's arrogant belief that he could skirt the restrictive, heterosexual mores of pre-sexual liberation England. If this plot sounds like it couldn't possibly have been the work of a Man Booker Prize-winning author, part of Hollinghurt's (The Stranger's Child, 2011, etc.) bold talent in this novel, as in his previous work, is to make it evident that lust, sex, and who does what with whom in the bedroom (and even how) are fitting, and insightful, subjects of literary fiction.A novel full of life and perception; you end the book not minding that the actual Sparsholt affair gets just the barest of outlines. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It begins in the early years of WWII at Oxford, where a quartet of friends are spending their last days as students before joining the conflict. They are Freddie Green, a budding memoirist; Peter Coyle, a would-be artist; Evert Dax, whose father is a famous author; and beautiful David Sparsholt. The novel, notable for its sophistication, then follows the lives of the four over the course of decades, concluding in the near present. Freddie will become a writer, as will like his father Evert; Peter will die early in the war, while David will found a wildly successful engineering and manufacturing firm. A very public indiscretion will become known as the Sparsholt Affair and give the novel its title. In the meantime, David and his wife have a son, Johnny, who will grow up to become a successful portraitist and the protagonist of the later parts of the novel. Their brilliantly realized milieu is the world of art and literature and, for Evert and Johnny, who are gay, the evolving world of gay society and culture in Britain. Superlatives are made to describe this extraordinary work of fiction; characterization, style, mood, tone, setting all are equally distinguished. Hollinghurst is especially good at evoking yearning, and, indeed, his novel will inarguably leave his readers yearning for more.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, by Antonio Damasio. (Vintage, $17.) Damasio, a well-known neuroscientist, makes a case for the centrality of feelings and emotions in human history. Unlike other accounts that focus on cognition and are largely unconcerned with the role of affect, his book reframes the history of humans and the natural world, putting feelings at its core. THE PISCES, by Melissa Brodér. (Hogarth, $16.) In this darkly funny novel, a depressed and stalled graduate student finally meets her dream date - who turns out to be half fish. As our reviewer, Cathleen Schine, put it, Brodér "approaches the great existential subjects - emptiness, loneliness, meaninglessness, death and boyfriends - as if they were a collection of bad habits." SHARP: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, by Michelle Dean. (Grove, $17.) In breezy biographical chapters on 10 writers, including Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Pauline Kael, Dean explores their successes and failures and their relationship to feminism. Above all, she considers the doubleedged nature of the word "sharp": It's a compliment with an undertow of terror, she writes. "Sharpness, after all, cuts." THE IMMORTALISTS, by Chloe Benjamin. (Putnam, $16.) In late 1960s New York, the Gold children visit a fortuneteller known for predicting the dates when people will die. The four siblings grapple with the prophesies over the next 50 years: One heads West for San Francisco, and another becomes a scientist, researching the possibility of living forever. For each, the knowledge turns out to be both a blessing and curse, and all must try to balance their desires and choices with their predetermined destinies. NO ASHES IN THE FIRE: Coming of Age Black and Free in America, by Darnell L. Moore. (Bold Type, $16.99.) Growing up gay and black in Camden, N. J., Moore had a brutal, violent childhood. In his book, he sets out to make visible the "forces that rendered my blackness criminal, my black manhood vile, my black queerness sinful," he writes, but despite the cruelty he faced, he suffuses his memoir with humanity. THE SPARSHOLT AFFAIR, by Alan Hollinghurst. (Vintage, $16.95.) Hollinghurst's emotionally resonant novel charts nearly a century of queer life and desires in Britain. When readers meet the title character, he's an object of intense desire among a group of male friends at Oxford. Years later, a sex scandal torpedoes his political career, leaving his gay son to claim the possibilities his father never had.
Library Journal Review
A glimpse of a nearly naked man in a window across an Oxford quad sets in motion a furtive affair between two young male students. The man in the window, the handsome and athletic David Sparsholt, is engaged to be married and about to enlist as a fighter pilot in World War II. His admirer is the arty son of a famous novelist. Their affair is brief, but repercussions linger. Although David returns from the war a hero and establishes a successful engineering company, the rest of the novel belongs to his son, Johnny, whose own homosexuality is only a little less difficult in the slightly more tolerant Seventies. Johnny's first flirtation with a cocky French exchange student is an exercise in teenage angst, and his later attempts at more satisfying relationships are hardly more successful. More troubling to Johnny is the long-lasting notoriety attached to his unusual surname from a sex scandal involving his father and two other men. VERDICT -Hollinghurst's (The Stranger's Child) sprawling novel, suffused with lust and longing, movingly portrays the generational shift in gay experience and acceptance. Warmly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 9/11/17.]-Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.