Author chronicles diverse network of friends, lovers
3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy) plays a mischievous role in an outstanding chapter of The Sparsholt Affair, English Booker Prize veteran Alan Hollinghurst’s sixth novel.
In the midst of grieving the loss of his partner, painter Johnny Sparsholt ponders a night out: “Going out, dancing, not just getting drunk as he had in his twenties, but taking powerful drugs, as he had a few times in his forties, ranked among the high pleasures of his life, free of all inhibition and doubt. Odd, then, that he’d surrendered it, he’d denied himself such nights for ten years or more. It seemed to him part of the tact of age.”
A few months after, Johnny’s in a gay bar’s toilet stall with a beer and some crystalline powder. He imagines himself through a security camera lens, collapsed on the dance floor and dying. With “all the energy and the love of the drug” suffusing him. Minutes later, a phone call demolishes this “rare nostalgic venture.”
Hollinghurst’s set piece chapter, the third in the substantial novel’s fifth (and concluding) part, is brilliant — funny, clever, and enthralling. Plus, a wry portrait of emotional flux.
It’s notable too for the vibrancy and assertive plotting. During the 380 preceding pages, though, I felt admiration for Hollinghurst’s luxuriant descriptions of moods, rooms, art objects and social nuances of queer past times, but listlessness too. Across four sections moving from 1940s Oxford to mid-90s London, becoming immersed in the lives of his nu- merous characters (or moved by them) rarely occurred.
In part, there’s a stylistic reason. Consider one sentence: “There had been no reply, though I felt, two nights later in Hall, when I took a place facing the rowers’ table, that there was something subtly self-conscious about Sparsholt, a first uneasy suspicion, in his stern young face and upright aloofness, that he might be being watched, or have turned already, in this place that was so new to him, into the subject of a rumour.” Even viewed as parody of a bygone florid style, that’s hard going.
Opening with a group of “deviant” young aesthetes competing for the attention of David Sparsholt, and closing 60 years later with Johnny, the “son of a famous criminal,” cruising on a phone app and regretting that he and his father “never really knew each other,” Hollinghurst chronicles an arty, privileged network of friends and lovers. A shadowy presence, the twice-married elder Sparsholt’s arrest during a ruinous midcentury gay scandal winds in and out of the narrative, a sobering reminder about conformity and prices paid during inequitable eras.