Rising to the Sunlit Surface

The title of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, The Sparsholt Affair, is the moniker given to a fictional British scandal from the 1960s. Like the real-life Profumo affair, it involves Tory politicians and the exchange of money for sex, but with a twist: In Hollinghurst's novel, the sex is between men, which was as illegal as prostitution at that time. One of the participants, David Sparsholt, a handsome war hero-turned-real estate developer captured in a notoriously compromising photograph, also ha...