To start, let’s compare Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel The Stranger’s Child to the Boston Red Sox. In 2004, Hollinghurst won the Man Booker Prize (Britain’s highest literary award) for his previous novel, The Line of Beauty. That same year the Boston Red Sox won their first world series in 86 years. Most sports prognosticators predicted that the Red Sox would play in the World Series this year just as The Stranger’s Child was the prohibitive favorite to win the Booker. Two weeks ago the Red Sox completed a historic September collapse and failed to make the playoffs. When the Booker shortlist was announced in September, The Stranger’s Child was nowhere to be seen. To drag the sports metaphor to its inevitable, clichéd conclusion: on paper, The Stranger’s Child seemed built to win awards.  With a century-spanning narrative, meticulously rendered scenes of alcohol-infused parties at vast country estates and a cast of literate, witty, repressed Brits in the throes of  forbidden romance, you can practically hear the Hollywood pitch: “It’s Possession meets Atonement meets Brideshead Revisited.” Broken into four major parts with a short epilogue, the opening sequence takes place over a weekend in 1913, when fledgling poet Cecil Vance visits the two acre family home of his Cambridge schoolmate George Sawle. George and Cecil are far more than just friends and share a magical weekend that inspires Cecil to compose an ode to his visit entitled “Two Acres,” part of which reads: “The book left out beneath the trees,Read over backwards by the breeze.The spinney where the lisping larchesKiss overhead in silver archesAnd in their shadows lovers tooMight kiss and tell their secrets through.“ As Cecil departs the Sawle home at the end of the first section, Hollinghurst shows that he’s as equally skilled...