What The Stranger's Child may really be about

Following up for a moment on yesterday's obscure post, as I was, and am, wrestling with some thoughts about fiction in general - and noting the difference between a novel in which the characters appear to have, with Forster called, dimension, or "round" characters, as opposed to what he called "flat" characters - this is a particular challenge for an ambitious novel that covers a span of time, especially one that covers multiple generations. A novel that takes place in one day or focuses on one central action or conflict gives us a "round" sense of the characters - we see them interact with one another in conflict and perhaps grow and change, but through an organic process - their actions and thoughts have what I called yesterday a sense of the inevitable. When we finish, and even as we are reading, we are completely within in the hands (of consciousness) of the novelist and we can imagine no other course of action for the characters other than what the novelist puts before us. However: in a novel that spans generations - right now I'm reading Alan Hollinghurst's "The Strangers Child" the challenge is greater. In this novel, we meet the central character as a teenage girl in the first section, in section two, 15 years later, she is a young mother; in the 3rd section, she is a cranky grandmother, looking back on three marriages and drinking way too much. Do we see how or why she evolved from one state of her life to the next? Is it "inevitable" from the first section, a teenage girl on a small English country estate being dazzled by her brother's friend, a homosexual Cambridge poet, that she would end up sponging in a small English town off her banker son-in-law? It is not. We could just as easily read the novel and imagine (or be told) that these are three separate characters. What holds the three sections together is merely the author's assertion that he is writing about the same people at different stages of their lives - and it feels like a construct rather than like an organic creation. The obvious comparison is MacEwan's Atonement, whose long shadow casts its pall over The Stranger's Child: as if Hollingworth is rising to the challenge of a conventional novel of the English countryside, of artists and of precocious children, of war damage, of a long span of time - but his novel doesn't measure up against MacEwan's. There is another major theme, however, that sets Hollinghurst's novel (and his work in general) apart - homosexual love (or passion) in various eras, and the cost on the psyche and the body of all the furtive behavior and socially imposed shame. Rather than the war poet, the thrice-married widow Daphne, or any of the other characters, the main "character" seems to be homoerotic passion, as it plays out, secretly (though less so in the later sections) among various couples - and it's the great secret, so far unrevealed, of the poet Cecil Valance's life (but not death).