The Sexual Histories of Alan Hollinghurst

The Line of Beauty remains Hollinghurst’s most satisfying book, in which the historical ambition and technical virtuosity of his six other novels are balanced with a tighter focus that allows for his greatest depth of characterization. From his debut novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), through his latest, Our Evenings, Hollinghurst’s fiction has attempted to dramatize English political and social change over the course of the twentieth century while also capturing the elusive, mysterious nature of desire in the lives of particular people caught in the tide of history. The tension between these two projects is what gives his work its sense of life and complexity.

Even when working on a grand scale, Hollinghurst is concerned with the subtleties and disappointments of human relations; there is a repeated sense throughout his work that the people we love or lust after might be, in the end, unknowable. Our Evenings explores these themes from new angles, particularly in Hollinghurst’s attempt to write across racial difference. The result, as in many of his other novels, is all the more rich for its ambivalence about the relationship between historical forces and individual fates.

though the novels before The Line of Beauty were more modest in scope than those that followed it, Hollinghurst’s work has always been preoccupied with the past. The Swimming-Pool Library, for example, is primarily set in the freewheeling gay spaces of London in the early 1980s, but it also features a significant subplot about the early twentieth-century colonial and sexual exploits of an elderly lord. The Swimming-Pool Library and its successor, The Folding Star (1994), are narrated in the first person by narcissistic young men almost singularly devoted to the pursuit of sex, and in both cases, their understanding of the world is complicated by historical revelations. The novels are mirror images of each other: whereas the former is exuberantly carnal—if there is a novel with more cruising scenes set in gym showers, I have yet to find it—and paced like a thriller, the latter is dense and discursive, structured around the protagonist’s aching, Nabokovian flights of desire for his teenage student.

His next novel, The Spell (1998), was labeled a disaster by some critics at the time, but it now reads as a transitional work. Though it lacks the political and sociological ballast that would mark his later writing, in its hedonistic set pieces—its tangled network of leading men are regular club-goers—and its subtler treatment of relationships, The Spell anticipates the more vivid joys and complexities to come.

The Line of Beauty seemed to set Hollinghurst off on a new course, due to both its immersive historical texture (its three sections take place in 1983, 1986, and 1987) and, perhaps, the novel’s grand success: it was an international bestseller that won the 2004 Booker Prize. Its extended scenes of dinners, parties, and liaisons are unhurried and luxurious; one feels the writer fully inhabiting the epochal moment he depicts. Though his next two novels also employ generous, ornate historical portraiture—an interwar dinner party descends into chaos in The Stranger’s Child (2011); a famous modernist writer visits Oxford during the Blitz in The Sparsholt Affair (2017)—the deep immersion achieved in The Line of Beauty is diminished by the increasing number of time periods covered. For good and ill, one can feel the pressure of ambition in the scale of these novels: The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair both span nearly the entire twentieth century, leaping through the decades at wide and sporadic intervals to tell the stories of multiple generations of lovers, families, and artists. And both books are rooted in murkily understood and unspeakable gay relationships whose consequences reverberate forward through time.

Cecil Valance, the central figure of The Stranger’s Child, is a young poet from an aristocratic family whom we meet in 1913 (uh-oh…) on a visit to Two Acres, the more modest household of his Cambridge friend and lover George Sawle. While there, Cecil attracts the attention of George’s sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, an infatuation he encourages, not least by writing a long tribute in verse in her autograph book upon his departure. The rest of the novel, which ends in 2008, elliptically chronicles the fallout of this visit, introducing us to generations of Sawle and Valance descendants and the webs connecting them via marriage, divorce, infidelity, and (in later sections) literary biographers. After Cecil’s death in World War I, the legacy of his brief life and poetry, which rises and falls with the cultural currents over the decades, becomes the uniting force in the lives of the novel’s sprawling cast of characters. There are secrets for the reader to discover, but most of them readily unfold or hide in plain sight. In this way, The Stranger’s Child is characteristic of Hollinghurst’s approach: the book is meticulously plotted, yet it is ultimately less interested in creating and solving a mystery than in showing the ways in which mysteries are created by the passage of time and the vagaries of human desire.

Long stretches of the novel follow what one might usually think of as secondary characters who here take on central importance. This indirect approach demands patience—it sometimes takes a while to understand who everyone is and how they relate to the central story—but also rewards it in ways that only a long, complex novel can. The novel is warmly indebted to E. M. Forster in spirit and to Virginia Woolf in its roving approach to consciousness, as well as in its tendency to keep many important moments off the page, occurring, as it were, between the acts. But the book’s scale is also unwieldy, its priorities obscured by the parade of characters and eras. It can sometimes feel, in his biggest books, that Hollinghurst is spreading a subtle and inherently withholding sensibility onto too large a canvas. In order to protect the inner mysteries of characters over such a span of time, he finds himself needing to add more of them.

The Sparsholt Affair follows a similar model, moving in five parts from 1940 to the smartphone era, though it is more relaxed in its plotting than the previous novel; perhaps as a result, its effects are more ambiguous. One feels, as the novel opens on a group of artistic Oxford students assessing the “new man” David Sparsholt, the author playing the scales of history, starting again at the top. While at Oxford, Sparsholt, who is engaged to be married, has a sexual liaison with Evert Dax, a painter. Most of the rest of the novel follows David’s son, Johnny, who is openly gay, becomes a painter himself, and falls in with a circle of artists and bohemians that includes Evert and other members of his Oxford circle.

Though it isn’t heavily underlined, Johnny’s shaggy adventures illustrate the movement of social mores, the shifting legal and emotional landscape in which Johnny is able to explore his sexuality in a way that his father never could. But even as Johnny’s life comes into focus, his father remains a cipher, recalcitrant and beyond the scope of his son’s, and the book’s, understanding. It seems a deliberate absence in the center of the narrative, one that suggests the unknowability of desire, especially in times before one’s own. After a never-fully-elucidated sex scandal destroys his first marriage, David Sparsholt marries again, and we don’t know whether he has further sexual relationships with men or what, if anything, he gets from his marriages. The scenes between David and Johnny are marked by reserve and things unsaid; when Johnny attempts to paint his father’s portrait, it results in a terrible argument, though we are not shown it. Is it too late for David’s liberation, or is it undesired? Perhaps, after writing David’s humiliation by the homophobia of his era, Hollinghurst feels obligated to grant his character a modicum of privacy.


the meta-literary and genealogical preoccupations of The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair obscured one of Hollinghurst’s great gifts: rebuilding the world at length through the careful accumulation of observed detail. His new novel, Our Evenings, in its subject matter and single (with one important exception) point of view, feels like a conscious return to the interests and methods of The Line of Beauty. The pastiche of earlier literary modes that recurred throughout his previous books is gone, allowing the reader untrammeled access to the narrator. Like The Line of Beauty, Our Evenings features a wealthy political family that serves as the protagonist’s sponsor to a world of privilege beyond his means. The particulars and the emphasis, however, are quite different.

Dave Win, the novel’s narrator, is an exhibitioner, or scholarship student, at Bampton, a prestigious boarding school; his spot was paid for by a gift of the Hadlows, liberal supporters of the arts. Dave is a classmate of their son Giles, who is both popular and a bully, qualities that will serve him well in his future career as a conservative “Eurosceptic” MP and arts minister. But Dave’s relationship to the Hadlows recedes into the background for long stretches. Instead we follow Dave’s winding path through the years, from Bampton to Oxford to his career as an actor, and his relationships with a series of men. Because he is an outsider, Dave, like Nick Guest, is a keen observer of the privileged spaces he inhabits. He is placed at a further remove by his race: Dave is half Burmese, the result of a relationship his English mother had while working as a typist for the last governor of British Burma after World War II.

It’s hard not to read Our Evenings as a response, if not quite an outright corrective, to the fetishistic treatment of race that runs uncomfortably through Hollinghurst’s earlier books. Though a sizable number of his protagonists’ partners and lovers have been people of color, he had never before written from the point of view of a nonwhite character. In The Swimming-Pool Library, Charles Nantwich, the elderly former colonial administrator, is obsessed with Black people and carries a torch for Taha, a Sudanese man whom he brought back to England as a house servant and who was killed in an act of racist violence. William, the novel’s narrator, is himself involved with a seventeen-year-old Black man, and some of his reflections on the experience can’t help but raise eyebrows: “Oh, the ever-open softness of black lips; and the strange dryness of the knots of his pigtails, which crackled as I rolled them between my fingers, and seemed both dead and half-erect.” In both The Spell and The Sparsholt Affair, protagonists go home with young Brazilian men they meet in clubs; in the latter case, the man, Z, is nearly a caricature of the empathetic native, comforting Johnny on learning about the death of his father (“‘Yeah…is very sad,’ said Z, taking his hand. ‘Sad for you.’”) before joining him for a shower.

The unease these moments provoke often seems purposeful, with Hollinghurst reflecting British society’s ambivalent revulsion and longing for “the other”—though some of the frank, assessing language would give a younger writer pause. Hollinghurst is aware that there is nothing straightforward about desire; his characters’ anxiety about having a racial “type” or preference is a frequent and pronounced occurrence in his work. By telling an archetypally Hollinghurstian story through the eyes of a character who would have been objectified in his earlier work, he appears to take up a distinctly of-the-moment challenge—that is, to humanize and give depth to the previously marginalized—even as his choice to inhabit Dave’s consciousness as a white writer risks charges of appropriation. Given the novel’s backdrop of Brexit, Hollinghurst’s intentions in this case seem fundamentally generous and inclusive. Even the title—the collective Our replacing the opening The of each of his previous six novel titles—suggests some shift in internal weather toward capaciousness, a desire to move on from the atomized strands of the previous books in favor of intimacy, both between the characters and between the author and his readers.

Hollinghurst’s approach to this change in perspective is, for the most part, characteristically subtle. Since Dave has been brought up in England and never met his Burmese father, his relationship to his ethnicity lies almost entirely in his appearance. His narrative voice doesn’t differ significantly from, say, Johnny Sparsholt’s, and Dave’s unknown father serves a role somewhat similar to that of the unknowable Cecil and David, troubling Dave’s relationship to his cultural inheritance. In this sense, the author remains committed to the strain of ambiguity that he developed in The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair; he will not be returning to the more conventionally satisfying “solutions” found in his earlier books, even as the storytelling recalls them. Still, one feels a missed opportunity in Dave’s (and Hollinghurst’s) reluctance to engage more fully with the backstory of his father’s life, an untaken chance to widen his aperture further.

Despite his quintessential Englishness, Dave is periodically reminded of his difference in episodes of both suspected and overt racism. When he seeks acting work outside his longtime experimental theater collective, he’s often relegated to minor or subservient roles. Even so, he is uncomfortable with the idea that this is the defining factor in his life. After a director refers to him during a rehearsal as a “young man with a grievance,” he wonders if it’s true. “I felt most of the company, without looking far, could find something that had harmed them, and oppressed them, and unfairly held them back,” Dave reflects. “I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I knew that I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.”

It is an oddly formal piece of rhetoric, the kind of thing a political candidate might say in a speech trying to tamp down an accusation of playing the race card. Hollinghurst’s previous narrators, even in the face of homophobic bigotry, did not feel the need to reassure us of their fundamental reasonableness. A similar ambivalence arises when Dave visits the home of Derry, an older admirer (and a clear echo of Lord Nantwich), and finds his home decorated with pictures of a Burmese dancer and former lover named Tony Sein. “I couldn’t sort out my feelings about being a type, when the type was one he felt such tenderness for,” Dave tells us—an equivocation that is difficult to disentangle from the author’s own complicated history with the subject. Dave accedes to a blow job from the older man, performed as perfunctorily as any other stop on the tour of the grounds, but he remains unsettled. His experience in the house occasions one of his most extensive reflections on his role as an exoticized “other,” leading to a characteristically Hollinghurstian impasse:

As we went back up the steps I seemed to gather, faint on the breeze, a sense of the liberties the house had been host to, the excitement, principled, and muddled too, about other races, black singers, Burmese dancers, the smart English queens turned on by the dark skins, the difference. Or was this merely my fantasy of what had gone on here, since I knew almost nothing about it? I couldn’t think yet about what had happened just now in the light of what had happened long before. In the moment I came I had thrown back my head and caught the cool gaze of Tony Sein.

Dave is at once proud of being desired, ashamed at the basis for that desire, and inchoately bemused by his place in an imagined erotic tradition. The portrait of Derry’s ex-lover warns Dave about his own interchangeability, even as he admits that the dynamic excites him, too. Upon leaving, Dave wonders whether his cab driver sees him (and thus whether he sees himself) “as a victim to be rescued or a fare to be soberly thwarted and screwed.” Neither seems optimal.

Though many of Hollinghurst’s novels are concerned with the historical lacunae of queer lives in earlier generations, his tendency, as an heir to the Forsterian tradition, is to focus on individual lives and their decisions rather than on systematic forces. This has kept his work from both a Whiggish insistence on historical progress and an overdetermined sense of the inevitable triumph of injustice. But the subject matter of Our Evenings forces Hollinghurst to engage more directly than ever before with English society’s racial and social hierarchies.

That cruelty and racism is most dramatically on display when Dave is in the company of his fellow troupe member and lover Hector, who is Black. In one particularly excruciating scene, an actress hands Hector her coat at the afterparty for a play, not realizing that Hector had been on the stage. Hector is furious, and Dave tries to rise to the occasion. “‘God, how much longer have we got to put up with this shit?’ I said, and meant it, though even to myself I sounded out of character.” Dave is intimidated by Hector’s silence before he eventually says, “tersely and quietly, as if it shouldn’t need pointing out, ‘David, you’re not even black.’” The moment serves to isolate Dave further—even sharing the burden of his lover’s discrimination is denied him.

The ambiguous role of race in Dave’s story is in part explained when, late in the book, we learn that we’ve been reading a draft of his memoir; like many public-facing documents, it has been composed to show us the face its author wants us to see. (That much of the book reads nothing like a memoir is the kind of minor incongruity inevitable in a first-person novel.) But even by Hollinghurst’s standards, Dave is a notably passive protagonist, drawn forward by the actions of others rather than by his own will. He often seems a baffled witness to his own story rather than a full participant in it.

To convey the inner life of this more recessive figure, Hollinghurst reins in his style, allowing a welcome looseness into his highly pressurized prose. The observations are as acute as ever—he describes a woman going for a swim by writing that she “strolled into the sea as if looking for something else, fell forward and shoved around with her head held up high”—but they are rendered more colloquially than in his earlier work. As a result, though it is nearly five hundred pages, the book reads quickly. Hollinghurst’s more straightforward narration captures the longueurs and failures and small triumphs of the passing years in a way that his other novels do not. It feels like the ushering in of a late style: in place of the more densely populated canvases of the earlier work, Our Evenings takes account of the breadth of one life’s meaning.


it would be impossible to convey what Hollinghurst is after in this novel without discussing its ending, which is both shocking and perfectly foreseeable. Late in the book, the Brexit vote occurs, in part thanks to decades of anti-EU and anti-immigration campaigning by Dave’s old classmate Giles. Then, with mere pages to go, there is a page break and an ominous shift in register: “I’ve seen it once, and I’ll see it for ever, though I shall never watch it again. The angle is high, and the light is a hazy-edged pool where walking figures enter, swell and cast shadows before melting steeply away.”

We realize that another narrator—Richard, Dave’s husband—is describing video footage of a hate crime, an assault on a man who “is quick and elegant in his movements, East Asian, perhaps, in appearance.” It is Dave, who has been attacked in the street by a man who called him a “Fucking Chink poof cunt” in the early days of the first COVID lockdown. He dies of a hemorrhage after two weeks in the hospital, prompting news reports that, to “optimize…interest,” make him “a bit more famous than he was.” He’s now, in death, a “celebrated mixed-race actor.”

The bluntness of this conclusion is deeply uncharacteristic of Hollinghurst, whose previous work took pains to grant his characters, in Grace Paley’s phrase, “the open destiny of life.” Read one way, it’s a jaded, even hopeless ending, a complex life reduced in seconds of violence—and then in the long national afterlife—at best to “celebrated mixed-race actor,” at worst to a series of racist and homophobic slurs. A more humane reading might make the episode enlightening: behind every victim of a hate crime, targeted because of their most visible identity, there is a universe of feeling and care. One can feel the author responding to the anger of our cruel political moment, no longer able to grant his protagonist the luxury of an unknown future given the furies now loose in the world. In this case, the systemic forces of xenophobia and homophobia overwhelm Hollinghurst’s humanism.

In the final line of the book, Richard can’t decide “if the possessive pronoun”—the “our” of the title provisionally chosen by Dave for his memoir—“is a solace or an assault.” The binary feels stark after a novel that has, until its final pages, dwelt intimately with Dave’s attempt to transcend the superficial categories forced upon him. It’s dispiriting, yes. But in this bitter concluding gesture, Hollinghurst has convincingly met his—our—moment.