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Alan Hollinghurst Tries to Atone
The writer has tended to fetishize marginal POC characters in his novels. In Our Evenings, he puts a biracial man at the center for the first time.
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. 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. 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.
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