Alan Hollinghurst, _The Sparsholt Affair_

 I HAVE NOT read all of Hollinghurst's novels, but having read four of the six, I'd say he's among the best living British novelists.

This one is structurally similar to the previous one, The Stranger's Child. It has some aspects of the classic multi-generational novel since we are following mainly one family over the course of many decades; it also has some aspects of the classic historical novel, since Hollinghurst wants to get down the texture and preoccupations of particular eras in the past. The brilliant thing is that he forestalls the tedium to which those genres are prone with a kind of hopping or fast-forwarding through time.

We start in Oxford during World War II--though it turns out we are reading a memoir of that period that one of the characters composed decades later--seeing the temporary obsession of one group of artistically-minded undergraduates with athlete and future fighter pilot David Sparsholt.

In the novel's second section, we are in the mid-1960s, getting mainly the perspective of David's son Johnny, who loves to draw people and is also figuring out that he loves other boys. We are in the last few weeks before a complicated political-corruption-plus-male-homosexuality scandal erupts in the tabloids, a scandal at whose center is David--the "affair" of the title.

In the third, we jump a decade to the mid-1970s, and Johnny is now a young man newly arrived in London, studying painting, finding himself in the outer orbits of the circle formed by those artistic people so fascinated by David back in the 1940s. He is also exploring London's new out-and-proud club scene, where he often has to explain his relationship to the still-notorious Sparsholt with an affair named after him.

The fourth section finds us in the 1990s, Johnny doing well as a portrait painter and also a father by virtue of having agreed to be the sperm donor for a lesbian couple.  The artistic friends from Oxford are aging, getting a bit hemmed in by their accumulated treasures. David has re-married and maintains a friendly but not particularly close relationship with Johnny.

Fifth, and finally, somewhere around now--Johnny's daughter Lucy is about to marry,  Johnny himself has become something of a celebrity as a portrait painter and is getting involved with a much younger man who says things like "thanks for reaching out." David dies, and the nude drawing of David made way back in the book's first section, having passed through a few hands, comes to Johnny.

Each section runs eighty pages to so, each with its own Updikean array of glancingly rendered period detail. Since each section also focuses on a relatively short period of time, weeks or months, we feel close to daily routines and quotidian events at all times, in the great realist mode, but since we have the daily routines and quotidian events of related groups of people over five different decades, we also get the long view, a deep historical perspective, especially about the astonishing changes in possibilities for LGBTQ people. All in a book that is not short--400-something pages--but never feels long.

It's a deeply traditional novel in many ways--or should I say one that skillfully mines the  resources of the tradition--while also re-inventing its possibilities.