Alan Hollinghurst Tries to Atone

Mirrors are everywhere in Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, Our Evenings . Dave Win, the theater actor who narrates the book, is constantly running into reflections of himself, in changing rooms, shop windows, his childhood home. Dave is gay and biracial; he was raised by his white mother in a small town in England, the result of a brief romance she had with a Burmese man while working as a secretary for the colonial government. His is a lonely upbringing, marked by a relentless sense of exposure: When people see him, they see someone who belongs elsewhere. When Dave looks at himself, he's not sure what to see.

Neither, at times, is his creator. This is new terrain for Hollinghurst, a pioneer of gay literature regarded today as one of the English language's finest novelists. Over seven books, Hollinghurst has explored gay life in Britain with exquisite precision, fine-grained social observation, and witty dialogue — the usual highbrow stuff, albeit more explicitly gay and very horny. His 1988 debut, The Swimming-Pool Library , married a sophisticated sensibility with scenes that find the humor and sociability in indefatigable fucking: A dick is commended as "short, stocky, ruthlessly circumcised, and incredibly resilient and characterful." An inspiration to younger writers like Garth Greenwell , Hollinghurst himself is a devotee of Henry James, a passion shared by the protagonist of his masterpiece, 2004's Booker Prize–winning The Line of Beauty , about a budding James scholar coming of age — and doing tons of coke — while lodging in the home of a Conservative member of parliament.

Whereas The Swimming-Pool Library transpires over one London summer — the last licentious gasp before AIDS— and The Line of Beauty spans the Thatcher era, Hollinghurst has lately been expanding his temporal horizons. His 2017 novel, The Sparsholt Affair , begins amid the Blitz and ends near the present day. Our Evenings also unfolds across an extended period: It's the fictional memoirs of Dave, who's 71 when the novel ends in 2020, the era of Brexit and COVID. The story skips episodically through boarding school, stage roles, and various romances. It's Hollinghurst's first novel with a person of color at the center; writing in the first person, he seems to struggle to articulate Dave's interior experience, especially when he's a child. But Our Evenings gains momentum as it goes on, flowering finally into something sadly beautiful — a meditation on growing old, the mutability of relationships, and the fragility of social progress, framed by the world-on-fire mood of the present. Like old age itself, it just takes a while to get there.

Our Evenings opens in front of a bedroom mirror one morning in the near present, as Dave reads of the death of Mark Hadlow, a lifelong friend who funded his scholarship to the fancy school where he met Mark's son, Giles. Where Mark was noblesse oblige personified, Giles has become a far-right politician and a driving force behind Brexit; his own mother describes him as an "authoritarian." This political dimension frames the book, which soon jumps back in time — not before Dave laments the national direction indicated by the twilight of men like Mark and the rise of men like Giles, "all over the papers, all over the country, tearing up our futures and our hopes."

In the next chapter, Dave is 13, visiting the Hadlows at their country place. The significance of many early scenes isn't clear, except as opportunities to stage what emerges as a primary childhood theme: a series of racist slights with Dave constantly reminded of his status as an other. "I'm not absolutely clear where you're from," a man says to him on this visit. The problem is that Dave has a limited emotional vocabulary for processing these events, and what words he can summon — shame, embarrassment, strange, anxious — he uses over and over again. Often in combination: "A strange embarrassment." "An anxious embarrassment." "An unexpected sense of shame." We learn little about Dave's developing psyche beyond his constant vulnerability.

The Swimming-Pool Library was also written in the first person, from the perspective of a white 25-year-old, Will, with an almost taxonomic interest in the men of color he encounters as he fucks his way around pre-AIDS London. Hollinghurst juxtaposes Will's chatty narrative against the diaries of an old British colonial administrator whose life story Will is writing; we see how the racial hierarchies of empire redound to the metropole. In Our Evenings, the script is flipped, as Dave, an offspring of Britain's imperial adventures, finds himself the object of the racist gaze — a fascinating arc, though Hollinghurst is better at describing the act of observing than the experience of being observed. Part of this is that Dave is such a mild character — it's as if Hollinghurst hesitates to give him much vinegar. Nick, The Line of Beauty's protagonist, was pretentious and something of a social leech, but he was our leech, our observer-at-a-remove of rarefied social worlds. Would that young Dave had more of Nick's bitchy knack for critique.

It's when Dave comes to sexual consciousness that Hollinghurst really starts cooking. On a family vacation, infatuated with a hotel waiter, he stumbles into a public restroom and, aroused by the dirty graffiti, jerks off — an occasion he'll later remember as "the first half-terrified imagining of another town, another world." Emboldened, he later approaches the waiter, surprising himself: "I seemed to be observing the person I'd become, and wondering what he'd do next."

Maybe there's another explanation for why young Dave doesn't quite come alive: He's lonely. Social interaction is Hollinghurst's métier, whether he's describing a gala or a bathhouse — anywhere characters can be revealed through interlocution as preening, lovestruck, insecure, supercilious. One reason some of his best characters are in their 20s may be that this is when identity coheres, when we leave the safe harbor of home — or, for many queer people, home's hostile environs — and learn whom we might become through various forms of intercourse with others. At the midpoint of this book, Dave develops crushes, bombs a crucial college exam, and, accepting that his life's path will be different than that of his boarding-school mates, joins an experimental theater troupe. The weaknesses of the first half of Our Evenings underscore Hollinghurst's great strength: He is deeply, brilliantly a writer of adult relationships.

Hollinghurst writes so well about intimacy because he understands how it can surprise us: A serious crush means not just being seen by another but a new openness to possibilities within one's own self. You learn through your desiring. It's genuinely moving to watch Dave grow older, as his childhood passivity transmutes into a grown-up confidence. Matching the evening mood, the prose isn't as showy as in previous Hollinghurst works. It's certainly less randy. When a 60-something Dave hooks up with a new crush, the two kiss, and Dave registers a pair of erections: "For now, there was little more to say." Little more to say? I guess Hollinghurst feels that row, as it were, has been plowed. We're all getting older.

The second half of Our Evenings moves quickly. When Dave refers back to previous passages, it's with the understanding that can be conferred only by age, after time has added meaning to ordinary experience. Like life, the book has an effect of accumulation, scattered scenes building toward something with real emotional weight.