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A review by wendoxford
The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst
3.0
This is an incredibly assured, brilliantly written novel and yet...I just couldn't warm to it.
The plot is oblique, requiring the reader to work hard, a style I normally love but I found it endlessly depressing. Generations of compromise, brutality, unhappiness, unrequited love played out against a homoerotic backdrop. I am neither prudish nor a lover of happy endings, and I find the moments of joy small consolation for the bleak journey through illegal homosexuality to more contemporary "gay abandon"
I was inexplicably unsettled by being put into the role of a backseat driver in a story of carcrash relationships, near misses, operating with undue care and attention alongside established learned habits. My delight in the style and language ended up being submerged.
The plot is oblique, requiring the reader to work hard, a style I normally love but I found it endlessly depressing. Generations of compromise, brutality, unhappiness, unrequited love played out against a homoerotic backdrop. I am neither prudish nor a lover of happy endings, and I find the moments of joy small consolation for the bleak journey through illegal homosexuality to more contemporary "gay abandon"
I was inexplicably unsettled by being put into the role of a backseat driver in a story of carcrash relationships, near misses, operating with undue care and attention alongside established learned habits. My delight in the style and language ended up being submerged.