Alan Hollinghurst sketches the evolution of gay rights

One thing I suspect history will forget about our era is how breathtakingly quickly the decisive turn in the struggle for gay rights happened. It was like the famous pitch drop experiment, in which a piece of tar in a sealed flask sags away from a larger hunk little by little, until, suddenly, after a decade or so, it simply drops. For a long time, national recognition of gay marriage felt like a goal set 10 or 20 years in the future. Then it just happened.

In his two most recent novels, first “The Stranger’s Child” and now “The Sparsholt Affair,” the superb English writer Alan Hollinghurst has made it his project to describe the agonizingly long time it took for gay life to reach its present state of encumbered but unprecedented freedom. The earlier book begins in 1913, the newer one in 1940; both stretch from an inciting act of passion to cross the decades to our current times.

Both have also had the difficult job of following Hollinghurst’s 2004 Booker Prize-winner, “The Line of Beauty.”

It made his previous (quite strong) novels seem like mere warning shots, and kept its successor, “The Stranger’s Child,” with its ambitious scope and uneven profundity, in a firm and distant second place among his work.

“The Sparsholt Affair” is shakier still. Many of its characters stay doggedly out of focus.It’s far more assured as a work of historical fiction than it is when it moves into the last few decades; despite moments of power, it never quite coheres.

What remains unchanged, however, is Hollinghurst’s status as one of the rare writers whose sheer presence is grace enough. Like Henry James, he writes prose so dense with lines of beauty that you can’t quite catch up to them in real time, lines that are razor close to human experience and yet — or therefore — retain a continual capacity for surprise. There’s nothing he could write that I wouldn’t read, and certainly not this rough but lovely novel.

David Sparsholt is the winsome Housmanesque athlete in the sights of everyone at Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1940, particularly Evert Dax, the son of a famous (later forgotten) writer. Sparsholt is engaged to a pretty northern girl and reads to others as unswervingly heterosexual. In fact his taste is more flexible.

Whom will the war take? That is part of the drama of this bravura early section; not Sparsholt, it emerges, when we leap a few decades forward to enter the perspective of his son, Johnny. Most of “The Sparsholt Affair” is about him, much of it after a scandal that never appears on the page, involving his father. Eventually Johnny becomes a widely admired portraitist, attracted, first nervously, then contentedly, to men.

His life comes to overlap with those of many of his father’s Oxford contemporaries.

In its later stages “The Sparsholt Affair” becomes an odd object. It is overwhelmingly sad — sad in the clear-eyed lonely fashion of Philip Larkin, nodded at here with a character named Jill — but its pointed use of time’s diminutions is not rendered as poignantly as in “The Stranger’s Child.” Secondary characters stay secondary; Johnny doesn’t carry the narrative, and the most important scene in the book, his final meeting with his father, is a failure. Like Ian McEwan, Hollinghurst deploys his gentle pity on the fantastically privileged.

But his unparalleled gift for observation sustains this novel where its plot and mission jag. Hollinghurst sees everything: the physical (“Johnny’s hair grew heavy and dark under the falling water, and unwaved itself into a shiny point between his shoulder blades”), the personal (“The niceness of his mother glowed through, her book turned face down, answering, hitching one thing of no great interest to another, and keeping it going”), the social (“in the cafe everything was small and expensive, a menu of items you didn’t precisely want”).

Even if this is not a second masterpiece, it is undeniably the work of a master.

Charles Finch’s most recent book is “The Woman in the Water.”