OUR EVENINGS: A Novel
by Alan Hollinghurst
Random House. 487 pages, $30.
“DAVID’S GOT an amazing memory,” says the husband of the narrator of Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, Our Evenings, and that’s an understatement. Hollinghurst is known for his love of precise description, and David Win, the half-British, half-Burmese actor whose life story we are reading, has the same all-noticing and descriptive eye. In Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library, it was architecture that was minutely described. Here, six novels later, it’s absolutely everything that a young man growing up in a provincial English town would notice about his community—especially if he’s biracial and homosexual. (Full disclosure: Alan Hollinghurst reviewed my last novel, The Kingdom of Sand, in The New York Review of Books, 7/28/22.)
Years ago, when readers dazzled by The Swimming Pool Library were waiting to see how Hollinghurst would solve the second novel problem, he produced a follow-up called The Folding Star—an atmospheric prose poem about a Flemish painter that is his only book not set in England. Midway through that novel, the hero goes back to England to visit his parents in the small town in which they live. Reading that brief interlude, I remember sensing that we were being given a tiny bit of autobiography—which made me wonder if he would ever write about that.
Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand. His other novels include Grief and The Beauty of Men.
