I wouldn't call voyeurism the theme of Alan Hollinghurst's absorbing new novel "The Sparsholt Affair" (Knopf), but it is its seed, its germ. The novel's primal scene is the glimpse, by Oxford students during the prescribed blackouts of the WWII blitz, of a transfixing nude male torso in a room across the quad, truncated almost exactly as it soon would be in a drawing by one of the artsier scopophiliacs. You feel the pitch as the characters run to the window, somehow affording the reader the best view.
From there the novel opens out - across time (the sweeping generational saga is a Hollinghurst specialty) and space. But in scene after scene, the ogling goes on in a myriad of ways with at least some avid onlookers not seeing anything that's outside the frame. It's no surprise that picture frames, and framings of characters known and unknown, e.g., an unnamed Tory disgraced by the "Affair," figure prominently throughout, all emanating from that big-bang view framed by window casings, parted curtains and, frustratingly, drawn shades.
In less deft authorial hands, this could be cock-teasing at its worst. But that first sneaked glimpse, as stolen as it is tantalizing, is the last innocent one - and itself framed as a memoir by one the peepers, Freddie Green.
What we learn, piecemeal, by reassembling the strips Hollinghurst feeds us from his imagination's busy shredder - the novel's omniscient narrator despite shifting points of view - is that David Dunn Sparsholt was at Oxford for only one term, captaining the crew while awaiting being called up to the Royal Air Force, where he became a star in the heavens, turning into an Icarus crisp only well after surrendering his wings.
DD, whose full name we are supplied only in bits, is Adonis handsome with a Michelangelo-sculpted body, traits he maintains longer than would be reasonably expected, and which contribute to his inevitable unmasking - which, quasi-studly, he survives as he did the war.
Kudos to the "Financial Times" critic who called out Hollinghurst for framing "arshol" in the name attached to the "Affair." If, unlikely, that was unconscious on Hollinghurst's part, it's proof of the existence of a creator god. It's yet another element that simultaneously conceals DD's sexual predilection while making it, for the reader, an eyeworm whose pronunciation-defying singularity screws its way into the mind.
There's less between DD's ears, but when has that got in the way of a successful business career? He's made good on his subaltern engineering studies at Oxford, to which he could have returned but didn't, knowing that Sparsholt Enterprises would benefit him more, while ceding him private time with men of a certain persuasion.
The temptation in describing a Hollinghurst novel is getting as caught up in the ur-narrative as its cast of characters does, literally for generations. But the substance of this novel is watching them, not ogling Sparsholt.
"Affair" is like a Merchant-Ivory production with more credible sex, complete with stunning landscapes and clothes (most of which gain attention for being ill-fittingly outre or otherwise over-the-top) and a soundtrack that manages to work in Mahler, heard and recalled in what could not be called tranquility. Hollinghurst's sophisticated style, with its diamond-cutter's feel for what qualifies as an edge, never goes full-on Jamesian. While his characters are averting their eyes, Hollinghurst sculpts their exact shapes.
Had he been one small degree more morgue-table psycho-pathologist, the novel could have been tragic, pathetic or, in the sense he meant it in "The Stranger's Child," classy "smut." But Hollinghurst sustains his subterranean human comedy with wickedly Wildean compassion, sufficiently well-mannered that you neither put the book down nor reach for a single stone to throw at anyone.
Hollinghurst has never stooped to conjure a fictional world where gay is good and straight is at best suspect. His secondary gay characters haunt some extremes and craftily elude morals or moralism, and, with one important exception, his carefully sketched female characters convince us that their men have made them hard. The vilest characters of either gender turn out to be at least as entertaining as they are bad.
A greater challenge is to make a gay protagonist who is a knot of complexities yet with whom readers fall hopelessly in love, till end pages do them part. Hollinghurst has capped his previous endeavors along that line with Johnny Sparsholt, guileless son of the secretive "Affair" Sparsholt. Eventually a successful if usually disengaged portraitist who has somehow survived the family scandal only endearingly wrecked, Johnnie is gay and runs the gamut of homosexual experiences and emotions before your wondering eyes just as his father ran interference on them.
Hollinghurst is a connoisseur of gay men's magnetic attraction to certain straight men, a natural force that implies the mutual pull of opposite valences. "Affair" is his deepest examination of that to date. It's not just because he writes sentences with precision that his characters are multi-dimensional. As startling is his capacity to render the full complexity of incidents with short, blunt bits of dialogue that tauntingly conceal as much as they claim to reveal.
When Evert Dax, whom we follow across the span of this book, at Oxford "confesses" to Freddie Green that his seeming pointless obsession with Sparsholt has climaxed in "I had him," the confidence raises more questions than it answers, and powers the rest of the book. You'd beg in vain for some spoliers.
"The Sparsholt Affair" author Alan Hollinghurst. Photo: Robert Taylor Photography