<i>The New Life</i> is an interesting piece of historical fiction. In alternating chapters, it tells the story of John Addington, a literary critic, and Dr Harry Ellis, a medical physician and member of the Fellowship of The New Life (an umbrella group full of utopianists, revolutionaries and suffragettes who agitated for various moral causes—vegetarianism, labor reform, and gender equality). Put into contact by the famous activist, Edward Carpenter, Addington and Ellis initially bond over their shared interest in the poetry of Walt Whitman and his cryptic allusions to "Greek life". Eventually, the two decide to collaborate on a historiographical and scientific survey of male homosexuality, "Sexual Inversion" (which was published in 1897). However, in the midst of the Oscar Wilde trial and an intensifying campaign of censorship against moral obscenity, this early attempt at sexology in Anglophone science was an abortive failure banned from bookstores. The novel gives an historical sense of 19th century homosexuality—the way it was enmeshed in Greek neoclassicism, literary decadence, Oxbridge hedonism, German psychopathology, Victorian puritanism and countercultural socialism.

But I think the novel clings too tightly to cautious verisimilitude. While it does take liberties (Addington died in 1893, long before the publication of "Sexual Inversion"), the novel still often felt more like a stilted period reenactment. Its narrative arc is ploddingly methodical, beginning with the two men's early marriages, their involvement in the New Life, their bourgeoning collaboration, and the ensuing familial rift and criminal prosecutions. But this style of narration didn't really allow for suspense or drama or intrigue. Marital feuds are quickly resolved; polyamory seems to be easily negotiated; and the public scandal and ignominy subsides without much of a whimper. The story oscillates between prurient scenes of masturbation and tedious dialogue and it doesn't build much narrative momentum. It tries to tease the reader with elliptical allusions to Ellis' own sexual kinkiness ("What is it, Ellis? What is your peculiarity?") but it was a little too contrived (it's obviously urine). I thought Addington's admission of homosexuality to his daughter was perhaps the most twee: "I am fond of Mr Feaver, you see. He is mine" to which she responds feebly, "Yes papa, he is yours. It is understood"—one can understand and empathize with the coded speech of repressed Victorians but the docile passivity here felt breathy and glib. Right there, in the emotional crescendo of the novel, it fizzles and it moves on.

Reading this novel, I felt like I was micro-dosing on a Hollinghurst novella. I definitely recommend but I just feel that the story, overall, lacked narrative oomph. Thanks to netgalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read!

We're approaching just mid-December, 2022, but I'm already willing to say that Tom Crewe's The New Life will be on my "Best of" list for 2023. It's imperfect, but has so, so much that rings true and is ripe for exploration that I felt oddly thankful as I read it.

Crewe takes us to London in the late 1800s. The trial of Oscar Wilde for sodomy takes place toward the middle of the novel. Crewe doesn't depict that trial. Instead, he uses it as background to explore issues of sexuality and identity at the time.

At the risk of making things sound "soap operatic," let me introduce the main characters—
• John, a respected thinker and writer, who knows he is homosexual, is questioning his marriage and his relationship with his daughters, longing to live a more honest life
• Catherine, his wife, has some sense of who the "real" John is, feels isolated in her marriage and terrified about the effect John's sexual choices might have on their family and their daughters
• Edith, a free-thinker and lecturer on social justice topics, has chosen an unusual marriage structure: she and her husband are deeply connected intellectually, though not sexually, and they live apart while spending much of their time together
• Henry, married to Edith, is also a free thinker and a writer—and fascinated by questions of sexuality, though his own is very narrowly focused he remains a virgin

Those are the four central characters. When Henry begins a correspondence with John—after reading an essay John has written on Walt Whitman—the two decide that they will write a book in defense of "inversion," using Greek and Roman history, as well as brief interviews with inverts they know or are introduced to. Just as their book is completed and being sent out to publishers, Wilde's trial takes over the headlines and changes the stakes for everyone—authors, spouses, friends, fellow activists—connected to the book.

Crewe's narrative pulls together a multitude of issues—gender, sexuality, class, political resistance, and widely varying concepts of what composes a "good" life—without becoming polemical. The book is written from John and Henry's perspectives, but Crewe makes every character (and there are several important characters beyond the four I've described above) complex in ways that are both engrossing and refreshing. In an afterward, Crewe carefully explains the legal case the story is based on, noting where he has and hasn't followed the historical record.

This title is being released on January 3, which means readers still have time to place an order with their local independent bookseller and to receive the book on the first day it's available. If you do this (and I urge you to do so), carve out a good bit of reading time on January 4 and 5. The New Life is hard to put down once you've entered its world.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the op[inions are my own.

Beautiful and fraught evocation of London in the 1890's--a difficult time, for pre-LGBTQ+ people, (and those who love them). As the author notes, he takes a novelist's liberties with his historical subjects, chiefly the co-authors of the book Sexual Inversion, John Addington ( Symonds) and Henry (Havelock) Ellis. Their stories are told in alternating chapters. John, who is attracted to men, sees the book as a chance to defend same-sex love using Greek, Roman and Renaissance history and art as precedents and Henry, who is a doctor, and who is not gay, brings a clinical interest in sex and is driven is part by his own unorthodox sexual predilection. For John, writing and publishing the book becomes almost a mania. the book he thinks will lead to acceptance and release him from his guilt and shame over having married a woman and had three daughters with her all the while pursuing men.. Loyal Frank, a lower class typesetter, becomes John's partner and sticks with him throughout. The women are more complicated--from Catherine, John's stern and disapproving wife, to Edith, Henry's wife and an advocate for women's rights, and finally, and maybe most intriguingly, to Angelica, who is Edith's romantic partner, and who, like John, is a firebrand for same-sex love.

The title of the book is both literal and metaphorical: Henry and Edith belong to a society of progressive thinkers called The New Life which seeks, among other things, to modernize traditional marital roles. Secondly, John is seeking a new life with Frank and Henry's new life with Edith and Angelica is a question mark.

Some of the characters a come to fully-rounded life more than others. I thought John's character received much more in-depth analysis than Henry's--and not just because Henry was extremely .shy. Also, Frank remains a bit of a cypher as does Edith. Angelica seems fully realized as does Catherine.

Once the book is written, the challenge is to get someone to publish it--which they do--but then the trial of Oscar Wide captivates London and indirectly leads to danger for authors. The book ends on an upbeat note for both John and Henry. Perhaps some sort of new life is possible for them after all.

I loved the descriptions of the outside world--most dramatically the London fog.

This is not a light read but, for me, it shed light on a period of LGBTQ+ history that I did not know and truthfully and accurately conveyed the costs and the risks of being true to oneself.

The subject of Tom Crewe’s début novel will likely be obscure to many readers, beyond those, like myself, who are gay history geeks. Many decades before Alfred Kinsey brought attention to the natural range of human sexuality, and eighty years prior to the psychiatric community decategorizing homosexuality as a mental disorder, two British academics John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis published a medical textbook, Sexual Inversion, that presented homosexual men as well-adjusted, healthy, and unjustly persecuted individuals. The year was 1897, and while the book faced skepticism and scandal at the time, it planted the seeds for a movement to depathologize and decriminalize gay sex. Crewe doesn’t seek to state all the facts about the authors’ lives and motivations, but in crafting his historical fiction, he drew heavily from the men’s biographies and changed their names just slightly. What results is an imagining of the events that led to Symonds and Ellis’s scholarship, grounded in what is known of the social and political climate of the time.

John Addington is a respected member of London’s intellectual class. He writes poetry and literary criticism and has a special interest in homoromanticism in ancient Greece. A gentleman of a certain age, he has a wife, two grown daughters and a daughter headed to Oxford University. He also has long been painfully aware of his attraction to men and kept that part of himself hidden from the world with the exception of a few clandestine sexual encounters.

Henry Ellis is a thirty-one-year-old newly married doctor. He and his wife Edith are proponents of an enlightened philosophy known as “the New Life.” The gist of the New Life is that society can be bettered by prizing intellectual inquiry over cultural convention, and with its egalitarian principles, it attracted socialists, suffragettes, and “sexual radicals,” as they were known at the time. Henry and Edith are well-matched in terms of values and academic passions, and they are both looking for a marriage that isn’t tethered by traditional roles and responsibilities. Edith is in a discreet affair with another woman. For Henry, his interest in marrying is a bit more complicated than seeking cover for homosexuality. He can only be aroused by a fetish, which he fears will render him unlovable.

John writes to Henry with praise for an article Henry wrote about the poems of Walt Whitman, and through their correspondence, the two men agree to collaborate on a book of case studies illuminating same-sex male relations. The story of how they bring their book to life (semi-fictionalized, Symonds and Ellis never actually met, and Symonds died before the book was published) is an immersive journey that has much to say about what it might have been like to be gay in the 1890s. Their subjects are terrified of being socially condemned and jailed, yet they manage to fulfill their needs for sex and companionship through coded signals, cruising grounds, and carefully curated social networks.

John and Henry risk a lot in publishing their work, and the question of how their daring endeavor will turn out is a surprisingly suspenseful hook. Oscar Wilde’s first trial for sodomy erupts in the midst of it all. Despite social liberality inching forward among the educated elite, a plague of injustices remain for gay men, from discriminatory penal codes to religious bigotry to blackmail.

Crewe delves deeply into each man’s struggles to come to terms with who they are. John enters a relationship with a working class man, Frank, who is substantially his junior, and with whom a long-term companionship is possible based on Frank’s desire to make a life together and John’s relative freedom now that his children are grown. He must adjudicate his deception to his wife and daughters while increasingly being aware of how society has deprived men like him the chance for self-acceptance and personal fulfillment.

Henry’s situation adds complexity to the sexual liberation theme. He feels a kinship to the men he interviews, as well as the subversive romanticism of Whitman, but his path is lonelier in some ways. His attachment to his wife is heartfelt, even desperate at times, but Edith will only be happy with a woman, and what man or woman would accept his sexual secret? Crewe is bold in portraying each man’s sexuality with sensuous detail, which gives his characters an appealing humanity.

The New Life is a well-realized novel that works both as a dramatization of gay history and a more personal story of two men searching for ways to live outside social convention.

Reviewed for Out in Print

I loved this book, it was at times heartbreaking and beautiful and at others made me (a queer man) feel connected to the past of my community in ways I rarely feel in modern fiction.

Thank you, Scribner, for allowing me to read The New Life early!

This was a fascinating debut and I totally agree with the comparisons with Alan Hollinghurst and Colm Tóibín as I read works by both of these authors and very much enjoyed them. And Tom Crewe was no exception as he wrote a write spectacular book.

Thank you to NetGalley for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The setting is London in the late 1800s. Two men, John and Henry, decide to write a daring book together about homosexuality, titled “The New Life”.

This book….it is and isn’t what I was expecting. It was less emotional than what I thought it would be, and maybe that’s my own fault for having the wrong expectations. However, I still found myself invested in the story and the characters. I found the book to be very insightful and captivating—something kept driving me to keep reading. I think that this is an important book, I’m just not sure that it was the right story for me.