*The New Life by Tom Crewe (Scribner, 2023)

 

This is a novel based upon the lives of Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, two Victorian men who collaborated on the book Sexual Inversion, which attempted to destigmatize and decriminalize male homosexuality by placing it in a historical context and detailing case histories of homosexual men.  Addington is a homosexual who has married and produced three daughters and hides behind this shield of heteronormative domesticity, destroying both himself and his long-suffering wife in the process.  Ellis, who seems to be only sexually excited by women urinating, is married to a lesbian writer and feminist, who is living with her female lover.  Theirs is not a happy marriage.

The novel, which follows the two men in alternating chapters, is set in the few years the men spend collaborating on the book and the few years after it is published in the wake of the Oscar Wilde scandal.  A bookseller is arrested for selling the "obscene" book, and the resulting court case destroys both men and their marriages.

The book is cleverly conceived and vividly imagined.  I read it with much pleasure and engagement, although I found much of the writing oddly inexact and estranging, as if Crewe was trying to be inventive and poetic and more often than not failing.  A less ambitious, more straight- (no pun intended) forward style would have made the book even more affecting and effective.