“DAVID’S GOT an amazing memory,” says the husband of the narrator of Alan Hollinghurst’s newnovel, 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 followup 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. Our Evenings answers that question. It’s set mostly in a small town called Foxleigh, where David Win lives with his mother, a seamstress who makes dresses for local women and lives alone with her son by a Burmese man she slept with years ago while working as a typist in Burma. Hollinghurst, who has never written autofiction, has, however, imagined a gay biracial youth who grows up in apparently the same provincial landscape as Hollinghurst did. Our Evenings is deeply nostalgic, and that is one of its great strengths. It’s by far his most emotional book. The core of the novel is the relationship between mother and son. He is her pride and joy, so excellent a student that he earns a place in a public (i.e., private) school through the philanthropy of an arts patron named David Hadlow, whose own son is Win’s classmate—one of the bullies, in fact, who disdains Win for being what the English used to call “a wog,” with whom he has his way after lights-out in the dorm. No details are provided, but a reference made by Win to his “bloody underwear” implies that anal sex took place. Win has to put up with a lot—not only sexual predation but a nearly ceaseless stream of what are now called micro-aggressions. When he and his mother walk through their little town, they are the subject of snubs by the people they pass. Greetings offered by mother and son are met with averted faces. The mother reminds one of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, though marked in this case not by the letter “A” but by the color of her son’s skin. They are ostracized even by his mother’s family. And there are so many times when someone on the street tells her son to go back to where he came from that it begins to seem slightly unbelievable—until you remember that many of these incidents are set in the 1950s and ’60s, long before social change made racism unacceptable. But young Dave does not let the malice deter him. He remains a good-natured, intelligent, ambitious, and handsome young man, patient and uncomplaining until, just as he’s about to get his degree at Oxford, he does something that reveals the rage he has been repressing all this time. And since Hollinghurst is a master of plot, he never lets anything remain as it is for very long. Time is always flowing, though often in jump cuts. The novel is strung along the thread of Win’s schools, from public school to Oxford, and that of his relationship with his bullying classmate, Giles Hadlow. We see the two men running into each other over the years as their careers take them to very different milieus. Win becomes an actor in an itinerant theater troupe, Giles a Tory politician. There are very few writers left who produce old-fashioned—that is, 19th-century—novels in which an author has made up a story with a plot and multiple characters from different social classes with different manners, as Hollinghurst has done here. Until now, his novels have been essentially satires. Something to Write About Home ANDREWHOLLERAN OUR EVENINGS: A Novel by Alan Hollinghurst Random House. 487 pages, $30. Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand. His other novels include Grief andThe Beauty of Men. March–April 2025 33 BOOKS
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