Over the past three years, the Kinsey Institute has quietly become a shell of its former self. Perhaps tellingly, its new director Sue Carter’s own research on vole monogamy has been cited by pro-abstinence and anti-pornography organizations to justify their positions. Carter was an unusual choice to lead the institute. Although she is the first biologist to head up the institute since Kinsey himself, her career has focused on rodents—in particular, on the prairie vole, one of the few mammals that pair-bonds and is monogamous.
Books
The Sparsholt Affair
The Sparsholt Affair is Alan Hollinghurst’s sixth novel, and like his previous two — the Man Booker Prize–winning The Line of Beauty and, subsequently, The Stranger’s Child — the story travels through a series of eras, capturing in each the nature of gay life in England. That, at least, would be one way to describe these works: another would be to say that, like them, the present novel follows the repercussions and echoes of earlier deeds or events over time. Beyond that, the quality that stands out in Hollinghurst’s novels, and here again, is the unstrained precision of his prose style, a justness and aptness of description that send happy jolts of recognition through the reader.
The story begins at Oxford in 1940, the second year of the war, and all is provisional. Buildings have been requisitioned, and students from various colleges have been thrown together. Many have already left to join the military. Some, like the narrator, Freddie Green, have been recruited for intelligence work. Freddie belongs to a group of friends who include Peter Coyle, a rather louche painter, and Evert Dax, a nascent art collector and the son of the novelist A. V. Dax, whose “unshakably serious” books are much admired though seldom enjoyed (their “nearest approaches to jokes were quotations from Erasmus and occasional mockery of the working classes”). Peter and Evert are gay and entranced by the sight, in a window across the way, of a beautiful being lifting weights. This, it turns out, is David Sparsholt, an engineering student who is about to sign up with the RAF — and who goes on to be awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and, later, to found a successful engineering firm.
“Spar . . . sholt . . . Sounds like part of an engine, or a gun,” Peter Coyle observes. And, indeed, Sparsholt is all efficiency and rather chilling practicality. Unlike his admirers, he leads an outward heterosexual life along with a closeted gay one, though, with respect to the latter, it seems that he may employ his beautiful body purely as a means to various ends unconnected — or not entirely connected — to desire. Although his name adorns the title, David Sparsholt, the man, is never really investigated. He is a cipher, a circumstance that is handily evoked by his coming from the industrial city of Nuneaton, which to Freddie has “something null about it,” and, graphically, by a chalk drawing made by Peter Coyle of his torso: “a portrait of a demigod from neck to knee, the sex suggested by a little slur, conventional as a fig leaf, while the neck opened up to nothing, like the calyx of a flower.”
The second part of the novel takes us forward to 1966 and is delivered from the point of view of David Sparsholt’s thirteen-year-old son, Johnny. He is gay, timid, and dyslexic, but with the budding talent of the portrait artist he will become. When we meet him, he is in the thrall of an infatuation with a visiting French boy named Bastien, a heartless little monster of manipulation who comes on holiday to Cornwall with the Sparsholts and another family. The section ends with an intimation of the beginning of the notorious “Sparsholt Affair,” a ruinous, salacious scandal that reverberates through the rest of the novel and turns on the fact that homosexual acts were still criminal offenses in England until 1967. There is a suggestion that the appalling Bastien might have had a hand in exposing the deeds that ended in Sparsholt’s notoriety, but that is never followed up — like so many things in this novel, which is one of lacunae.
Thus we move on to 1974. In Britain it is a dreary year of labor disputes, rolling power cuts, and the “Three-day week.” Johnny is working for Evert Dax, now a writer and part of a bohemian coterie, and through this association he becomes friends with two lesbians, to whom he eventually donates sperm. The resulting child, Lucy, shows up in the next section, set in 1982, and from there we are brought to 1995 and finally 2012. Hollinghurst’s evocation of different eras and of how gay life is lived in each is deftly portrayed; and each section evolves into a substory of what we may loosely call the plot. But therein lies cause for disappointment, for each developing narrative is abruptly cut off once — it truly seems — we have become thoroughly engaged with it. We find ourselves plunged into the next era to find predicaments dissolved and a whole new set of circumstances reigning. It is frustrating, all the more so as each section is so beautifully composed, so filled with fully formed characters, arresting images, and currents of surreptitious humor.
Hollinghurst has few equals in the exactness with which he summons up human traits, often with comic brio. This is especially so in the last part, which finds Johnny at sixty years of age in a milieu that prizes youth and a well-tended physique. He is at a gay nightclub, observing, amid the throng of young men, the few “bald and grizzled pillars of his own generation.” He “was troubled by them for a second, and then as quickly grateful that some looked older than him.” He heads off to the gents, elevated by Ecstasy:
In the mirror as he queued he saw himself, astonished wide-eyed figure, pink-faced, grey thatch rustic among the sharp cuts and shaven heads of the young people sliding and barging past him, but there was nothing he could do about it now and giving himself a sexy smile which got an ‘All right?’ from the friendly Chinese boy pressing in beside him, he went to a place at the trough. A few minutes later he set off again at a strange wading stagger to find his friends.
As with so many passages in this novel, everything is perfect here: the scene, the visual truth, the pacing, the mood, and, not least, the author’s kindly touch. It very nearly makes up for our being wrenched out of story after story.
The post The Sparsholt Affair appeared first on The Barnes & Noble Review.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2DFWAKB
Desolation Row
Lorca’s early poems are filled with elemental things, like a Miró painting—night, star, moon, bird—but they come with edges of strangeness and menace, like a Dalí painting—clock, knife, death, dream. He is never interested in just describing a scene. Instead, he begins to work on a set of associations, using echoes in the patterns of sound and sometimes a strict metrical form as undercurrent, thus suggesting a sort of ease or comfort at the root of the poem so that the branches can grow in any direction, with much grafting and sudden shifts, as his mind, in free flow, throws up phrases that, however unlikely, he allows in, thus extending the reach of the poem, or at other times pruning it briskly back.
As If!
Kwame Anthony Appiah is a writer and thinker of remarkable range. He began his academic career as an analytic philosopher of language, but soon branched out to become one of the most prominent and respected philosophical voices addressing a wide public on topics of moral and political importance such as race, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, codes of honor, and moral psychology. Two years ago he even took on the “Ethicist” column in The New York Times Magazine, and it is easy to become addicted to his incisive answers to the extraordinary variety of real-life moral questions posed by readers. Appiah’s latest book, As If: Idealization and Ideals, is in part a return to his earlier, more abstract and technical interests.
Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism
It is imperative to ask why and how this obscure Canadian academic, who insists that gender and class hierarchies are ordained by nature and validated by science, has suddenly come to be hailed as the West’s most influential public intellectual. Peterson rails against “softness,” arguing that men have been “pushed too hard to feminize,” like other hyper-masculinist thinkers before him who saw compassion as a vice and urged insecure men to harden their hearts against the weak (women and minorities) on the grounds that the latter were biologically and culturally inferior. Peterson’s ageless insights are, in fact, a typical, if not archetypal, product of our own times: right-wing pieties seductively mythologized for our current lost generations.
In the Review Archives: 1966–1968
Fifty-five years ago, The New York Review published its first issue. To celebrate the magazine’s emerald anniversary, in 2018 we will be going through the archives year by year, featuring some of the notable, important, and sometimes forgotten pieces that appeared in its pages. That first issue included a short note, addressed To the Reader: “The hope of the editors,” they wrote, “is to suggest, however imperfectly, some of the qualities which a responsible literary journal should have and to discover whether there is, in America, not only the need for such a review but the demand for one.”
Grown Men Reading ‘Nancy’
The appeal of Nancy to the art comic crowd might seem counter-intuitive, but while Nancy was never particularly clever, it was always cleverly constructed. In fact, the accomplishment of Nancy, with its refined, reduced lines and preoccupation with plungers and faucets, might primarily be a matter of form. The beauty of cartooning may be difficult to appreciate, especially for those who have not been versed in cartooning for years. By dissecting this gag strip so systematically, How to Read Nancy is important for people working in the form, and also for the cartooning medium as a whole to be understood and recognized as the unique art form that it is.
Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism
Writing for White Russian émigrés in the 1920s and 1930s, Ivan Ilyin provided a metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a fascist state. But his ideas have now been revived and celebrated by Putin: because Ilyin found ways to present the failure of the rule of law as Russian virtue, Russian kleptocrats use his ideas to portray economic inequality as national innocence. And by transforming international politics into a discussion of “spiritual threats,” Ilyin’s works have helped Russian elites to portray the Ukraine, Europe, and the United States as existential dangers to Russia.
The B&N Podcast: Roma Downey
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
With her role as a heavenly creature on the long-running television drama Touched by an Angel, the actor Roma Downey became an icon to fans, and she became a Hollywood power as the co-producer of the hit miniseries The Bible. With her new book Box of Butterflies, Downey opens up about her childhood in Northern Ireland, her early losses of both her beloved parents, and the joy of her close relationship with costar Della Reese. She joined us in the studio to talk about how she finds inspiration in life’s struggles and tragedies.
Roma Downey—best known as the beloved angel on the TV show Touched by an Angel—has created a beautiful book filled with encouragement and hope, assuring us of God’s comforting presence in our lives.
Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.
The post The B&N Podcast: Roma Downey appeared first on The Barnes & Noble Review.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2HFOOmB
Why Irish America Is Not Evergreen
At this St. Patrick’s Day, one could be fooled into thinking that the Irish-American community is as robust as ever. But changes to US immigration rules have largely closed the door to new entries, leading inexorably to a “graying” of Irish America. I didn’t realize when I came here in the late 1990s that thanks to multiple failed attempts at immigration reform, the conveyor belt of Irish immigration would more or less stop with my generation. What that means for Irish-American identity in general, and the New York Irish in particular, is becoming a pressing issue.
Sig Nordal 