Stranger's Child (Hollinghurst)

Book Reviews
Among the sometimes bloodless English male novelists of [Hollinghurst's] generation, he is the one whose cleverness is least in conflict with his ability to make the reader feel as well as see the story…As always, Mr. Hollinghurst maintains an almost perfect balance between momentum and still life. He is also shrewdly funny.
Emma Brockes - New York Times


Hollinghurst's fine new book, The Stranger's Child—the closest thing he has written to an old-fashioned chronicle novel—contains a whole hidden literary curriculum, out of which he has fashioned something fresh and vital.
Thomas Mallon - New York Times Book Review


Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child could hardly be better.... Most novelists tend to be slightly show­offy, in one way or another; it's how they make clear that what they're doing is art. But Alan Hollinghurst doesn't need to be a prose Johnny Depp. Instead, he writes with the relaxed elegance and unobtrusive charm of a Cary Grant. Part social history, part social comedy and wholly absorbing, The Stranger's Child does everything a novel should do and makes it look easy.
Michael Dirda - Washington Post


At once classically literary and delightfully, subversively modern...The Stranger's Child is easily [Hollinghurst’s] most subtle and most ambitious novel. Hollinghurst is a master observer of human and social behavior. As told in five sections spanning nearly a century, The Stranger's Child uses the mode to startling, marvelous effect, as his characters grow old and perish while the fractured, uncertain memories of each remain—for future inhabitants to debate and unearth.... Fans of Hollinghurst know him for his flawless phrasing, his wickedly funny depictions of class and society, and his distinctive, enduring sensuality, all of which continue here, but in telling the story of a young poet's legacy over the course of a century, Hollinghurst displays an exciting shift from earlier work.... Unlike other novels that make use of lengthy passages of time and revolve around long-deceased characters, The Stranger's Child is not as absorbed with nostalgia. It's a clear-eyed look at how strange and perplexing memory is, and how vague and uncertain our relationships, sexual and otherwise, can be. It's a thrilling, enchanting work of art, and the latest in what we can only hope will be a very long career.
Adam Eaglin - San Francisco Chronicle


Magnificent...insightful. Hollinghurst explores how a living, breathing existence can become a biographical subject riddled with omissions and distortions.... Hollinghurst divides the novel into five novella-length sections, in each of [which] he demonstrates his knack for conjuring the moments between events, the seeming down time in which the ramifications of turning points in life sort themselves out. His immersion in each period is fluid and free of false notes, collectively fusing into a single symphonic epic...[a] beautifully written, brilliantly observed and masterfully orchestrated novel.
Michael Upchurch - Seattle Times


A sly and ravishing masterpiece... The novel skips with indecent ease through 100 years of British political and literary history, concealing its mighty ambition in charm and louche wit. It's a devastating history of gay love, erasure and resilience. It's also a ripping yarn, a simple love (or rather, lust—Hollinghurst's characters are too Wildean for love) story as literary whodunit: Brideshead Revisited crossed with Possession... Behind the bloom of Hollinghurst's prose, another project quietly unfurls. As much as The Stranger's Child is about England and Englishness, about war, about the impulse toward biography, it's profoundly and unmistakably a secret literary history. It's the tapestry of British literature turned around to reveal its seams, to reveal that the history of the British novel has been the history of gay people in Britain. It's Oscar Wilde and A.E. Housman, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf and the entire Bloomsbury set, a history—as Cecil's is—of invisibility, secrecy and scandal, censure and frenetic posthumous outing. This precis might be stuffy; the book never is. The Stranger's Child restores gay life and love to the vibrant center of the British novel without a hint of solemnity or righteousness, only supple prose and a sodden, fun bunch of obviously, gloriously gay characters. Seldom has literary restitution proved so pleasurable.
Parul Sehgal - Cleveland Plain Dealer


Masterful.... Few novels so skillfully revealed what's really said behind polite facades, and The Stranger's Child displays that talent on a broader canvas.... Hollinghurst is a superior novelist of manners, and the brilliance of The Stranger's Child is in how it reveals the ways bad blood and secrets muck with history. When everybody strains to say the appropriate thing, the facts suffer. That theme is perfectly suited for Hollinghurst, who can reveal a host of hidden messages in the simplest utterance (or pursed lips).... Psychologically penetrating...brilliant.
Mark Athitakis - Minneapolis Star Tribune


Cecil Valance, with his truculent gaiety and his big hands, is a wonderful creation, the perfect type of upper-class aesthete of the time: self-assured and overbearing—a bully, mocking, and entirely in thrall to himself and his distinctly modest talent.... Hollinghurst is a master storyteller, and his book is thrilling in the way that the best Victorian novels are, so that one finds oneself galloping somewhat shamefacedly through the pages in order to discover what happens next. The writing is superb—I can think of no other novelist of the present day, and precious few of the past, who could catch human beings going about the ordinary business of living with the loving exactitude on display here. Two or three times on every page the reader will give a cry of recognition and delight as yet another nail is struck ringingly on the head.... Dazzlingly atmospheric...fantastically intricate windings of a plot, with all manner of excursions along the way—a sequestered cache of letters, questions of doubtful paternity, clandestine affairs—in other words, all the twists and turns that human relations will insist on making. For the daring of its setting out, and for the consistent flash and fire of the writing, The Stranger's Child is to be cherished.
John Banville - New Republic
 

A sweeping multi-generational family saga...beautifully written. The Stranger’s Child has been compared to the work of Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster, and, as with Hollinghurst’s previous novels, Henry James, as well as that of contemporaries like Ian McEwan (for Atonement, which, on the surface, has many similarities) and Kazuo Ishiguro (for The Remains of the Day). But Hollinghurst brings a precise elegance to the genre, building upon the novels that came before it. This was the first novel in a long while that pulled me in wholeheartedly. We live in a time when things struggle to stick: competing influences, recommendations, and links, bombarding us and casting aside one new thing for the next.... It seems difficult to imagine that we wouldn’t take all of these characters with us through our lives in turn.
Elizabeth Minkel - Millions
 

The Booker Prize-winning author’s new novel covers a century and traces a love triangle torn from the pages of Brideshead Revisited though at least one side of the triangle is addressed more directly than Waugh did in his classic tale. With ambition and scope Hollinghurst uses a "love in wartime" narrative to explore the deep and wildly complicated connections between memory and what passes for history. —Publishers Weekly Top 100
Publishers Weekly


With the prewar ambience of Atonement, the manor-house mystique of Gosford Park, and the palpable sexual tension of Hollinghurst's own The Line of Beauty, this generously paced, thoroughly satisfying novel will gladden the hearts of Anglophile readers. —Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont
Library Journal


Cecil Valance is a poet of terrific talent who, according to a guest in a comfortably English countryside house, is "not so good as Swinburne or Lord Tennyson." In his defense, he is still young.... War is looming, and Cecil...seems pleased at the prospect of trying his skills out on the Kaiser's boys. Alas, things don't work out as planned.... Now a biographer, working with the clues, is making the claim that Valance belongs in the canon not just of modernist British poetry, but of gay literature as well—a claim that, though seemingly well defended, stirs up controversy.... How do we know the truth about anyone's life? Hollinghurst's carefully written, philosophically charged novel invites us to consider that question.
Kirkus Reviews