THE NEW LIFE

Two Englishmen dare to challenge Victorian-era homophobia.

In 1894, John Addington, a well-off married man with three daughters, can no longer deny his attraction to men. Henry Ellis, a virgin who’s studied to be a doctor and has an academic interest in sex, has married Edith, a young bisexual writer, and they soon invite another woman into their relationship. (The quasi-throuple is almost as scandalous as his fetish for watching women urinate.) Coincidence and a shared enthusiasm for Walt Whitman connect John and Henry, and though they never meet, they begin to collaborate via letters on a kind of proto-Kinsey report about the lives of gay British men. At that time, gay men were subject to two years to life in prison if found out; to publish a book on homosexuality courted additional calamities. (The plot integrates Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial, conviction, and imprisonment for “gross indecency.”) Crewe, an editor at the London Review of Books, deftly captures the atmosphere when “the law frightens us into lies,” as John puts it. (John’s betrayed wife is especially well drawn.) The novel’s plot is loosely based on the lives of two pioneering researchers on homosexuality: John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis. But the novel is equally inspired by works by Alan Hollinghurst like The Stranger's Child (2011), models for British fiction about gay men that’s intellectual, erotic, and wise to the nuances of the British class ladder. Crewe has his own rich and engrossing style, though, and his own approach to plot dynamics, concluding the story with a dramatic trial sequence that captures a mood of both frustration and defiance, blending the graceful ambiguity of literary fiction with the deftness of a page-turner.

A smart, sensual debut.