Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel is The Sparsholt Affair. From the transcript of his NPR interview with Ari Shapiro:
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Alan Hollinghurst is an English novelist who likes to explore private, secret lives. His characters are often gay men, sometimes living in an earlier era when they wouldn't use the word gay to describe themselves. Hollinghurst won the Man Booker Prize in 2004 for his novel "The Line Of Beauty." His new book is called "The Sparsholt Affair." It begins in Oxford in 1940 when a bunch of college friends spot a young man through a window. He is David Sparsholt.--Marshal Zeringue
ALAN HOLLINGHURST: When we first meet him he is notably handsome, muscular, with a very clear sense, unlike some of the students around him, of where he's headed.
SHAPIRO: He's headed off to fight in World War II. Over the five sections of this novel, the narrative jumps forward decades in time, eventually bringing us to London in 2012. Along the way, we watch British society change. We watch characters age and raise families. But there's a lot we don't see. Many of the most dramatic moments of the story happen between the sections off-screen.
HOLLINGHURST: Especially when you're selecting five episodes from a span of 70 years you have to be pretty careful in deciding early on what you're going to omit and what you're going to include. I mean, almost everything is left out of this kind of narrative. So the selection of what goes in has to be...[read on]
