Silverlake Blvd.

Alan Hollinghurst’s Sparsholt Affair

 

I got it from the UK because I couldn’t wait; gobbled it down in two days; and then … didn’t care for it. Yet another version of a novel Hollinghurst had already written a couple of times: gay Londons unfolding over several generations via overlapping personal and public histories (Swimming Pool Library, Stanger’s Child).

 

But then it kept me up all night. I couldn’t stop thinking about Johnny and Ivan’s weekend in Wales. The horribleness of it is magnificently realized: Johnny madly infatuated with Ivan, Ivan more interested in adding to his diary (literally). The details tumble out, each more ghastly/hilarious than the next. A Bridget Jones episode retold by Edith Wharton. It might be the best thing Hollinghurst ever wrote.

 

Or would that be the Lucy chapter: an episode from the mid-1990s told from her pre-teen point of view? Her father’s art opening and her father’s boyfriend’s vegetarian cooking for the celebratory dinner are presented with a perfectly pitched mix of possessiveness, distaste, affection, boredom, pride and exasperation. Lucy’s the perfect observer of Hollinghurst’s favored middling milieu: literate and arty but not visionary, bohemian but not threatening, comfortable but not rich.

 

And then, as always with Hollinghurst, the homes and haunts of the characters are portrayed as characters in their own right. We get not only the look and feel and sounds of Johnny’s first gay club in the 1970s, but of a another gay club in the early 2000s (“the music grew louder and louder like a boring threat”).

 

After a second read I recognized some of the things I took for faults were also part of the design.

 

For example, Hollinghurst doesn’t delineate lines of connection between all the characters. Some lines fall slack, but there are others that are very fine. Not only filiations but symmetries abound. Both Evert and Johnny suffer from their famous fathers. Johnny’s frustration with Ivan mirrors his teenage crush on a suddenly uninterested last-summer flame. Unexpectedly intimate sketches turn up in Wales and in London.

 

And the jarring shifts of time and place are also necessary for Hollinghurst’s purpose.

 

In the third section, set in the early 1970s, Johnny meets some of the characters introduced in the first (in WWII Oxford) Hollinghurst skips over their careers, because he wants us to see them as Johnny does: already settled into the ruts they will inhabit till death. “The dusk seemed to have taken them unawares.”

 

Likewise it’s not a fault that we only hear a bit about Johnny’s life with Pat. Satisfactory domestic happiness isn’t interesting to our author. Longing and frustration are. Frustration in the sense of the connection that doesn’t really connect. Hollingsworth’s point is that that’s not the end of it. Those romantic dead ends aren’t, in fact, dead ends at all, but have other ramifications for us, our friends and families, and people we'll never know.

 

[Image: Federico Barocci, 1590s]

Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government

 

 

Slezkine’s non-fiction novel compiles letters, diaries and other documents of dozens of residents of a monumental 1931 apartment building on the Bersenevskaya Embankment in Moscow. It traces their lives from the last years of the Tsar through the end of World War II, with glimpses of subsequent events.

 

This time and place has been gone over a million times before, but Slezkine has a distinctive point of view:

The Bolshevik Reformation was not a popular movement: it was a massive missionary campaign mounted by a sect that proved strong enough to conquer an empire but not resourceful enough to either convert the barbarians or reproduce itself at home. In the meantime, the founders’ children had moved from the romance of those embarking on a new quest to the irony of those who have seen it all before.

 

By “sect” Slezkine means millenarian sect, and he’s not speaking figuratively. He means a movement focused on disrupting and reforming every aspect of life, public and private (the Münster Anabaptists, the Puritan revolution, the French Revolution, Fascism, Nazism, Cuba, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Khmer Rouge, the Islamic Republic). He interprets Soviet history as characteristic moments of a millenarian group’s life-cycle. Especially the Great Terror of the 1930s. It’s a compelling view:

There was no longer such a thing as a mistake, accident, or natural disaster. According to the campaign’s logic, any deviation from virtue—not only in human thought and deed, but in the world at large—was the result of deliberate sabotage by well-organized agents of evil. It was the logic of magic; the logic of “traditional societies,” in which misfortune is attributed to spirits or witches; the logic of all witch hunts, which return to tradition by promoting healing through acts of scapegoat sacrifice.

 

Slezkine is also alert to the symbolism of buildings:

The canonical memory of the October Revolution, like that of its February precursor and French model, was about moving from one building to another—until such time as “the city of pure gold, like transparent glass,” could be built. This time the flood swept into Smolny, surged up to the third floor, whirled around the entrance to the Military-Revolutionary Committee office, and then flowed, in orderly streams, toward the Winter Palace, where old men with empty eyes sat waiting. … Bolshevik eschatology was based on the assumption that the masses would stream toward the appropriate room in the appropriate building.

 

Slezkine’s method grounds this analysis in mundane reality. Many of the Communist Party elite who inhabited the House of Government were not sympathetic characters, to say the least. By following their lives in detail, it’s possible to see them as human beings. The book is stuffed with political murders, but also love affairs, well-cared-for children, holidays, and intellectual adventures. Slezkine is not trying to make Bolshevism seem romantic, but documenting the fact – unwelcome to ideologues of both sides – that nevertheless private life went on, even under the least auspicious conditions.

As he says:

Revolutions repeat themselves: first as tragedy and then as family tragedy. They begin as rebellions against the eternal return and end at home, amidst women and children. If they attempt to survive by executing their high priests for betrayal, they end a little later, amidst broken families and old love letters.

 

[Image from the House of the Embankment Museum]