The Stranger's Child.(Brief article)(Book review)

The Stranger's Child

Alan Hollinghurst. Knopf, $27.95 (464p) ISBN 978-0-307-27276-8

Hollinghurst, author of the Man Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty, published seven years ago, stakes his claim for Most Puckishly Bemused English Novelist with this rambunctious stepchild to the mannered satires of Henry Green, E.M. Forster, and especially Evelyn Waugh. Fancy young George Sawle returns from Cambridge in 1913 to his family estate of Two Acres in the company of the dashing poet Cecil Valance, secretly his lover. Cecil enjoys success and popularity wherever he goes, and George's precocious sister, Daphne, falls under his spell. To her he gives a poem about Two …