The Author in Evening
At 70, Alan Hollinghurst is dancing to quieter music, but he’s still our most elegant living writer.
Gay life, fine art, and the British class system have been mainstays of Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction since his dizzyingly explicit debut novel, 1988’s The Swimming-Pool Library. Hollinghurst’s earliest work fizzed with the energy of a newly acquired freedom to describe what gay men do together in a style many regard as the most elegant in contemporary English. Over four decades and seven novels, the balance among his three themes has shifted, reaching its perfect equilibrium in his masterpiece, 2004’s The Line of Beauty, winner of the Booker Prize. With Hollinghurst’s latest novel, Our Evenings, class—and its subtle, typically unspoken strictures—now predominates. The result is a lovely, elegiac consideration of how people find happiness in the margins and crannies of the mainstream, and how fragile that joy can be.
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Our Evenings is narrated by Dave Win, the child of an English woman, Avril, and a Burmese father who’s completely out of the picture. Bright and talented, Dave wins (his surname is no coincidence) a scholarship, funded by a wealthy family, to a posh boarding school. The book begins as Dave, now an adult, learns of the death of Mark Hadlow, the cultured and benevolent head of the family overseeing the scholarship, who with his wife treated Dave as a sort of surrogate son. Mark was estranged from his own son, Giles, a bullying, philistine schoolmate of Dave’s, due to Giles’ boorish Tory politics. A mélange of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, Giles is a major proponent of Brexit, and he appears at strategic moments during the novel as a foil for Dave.
As a boy, Dave is the largely passive object of other people’s actions. His race remains notional throughout. He’s never been to Burma and never met his father. There’s no “Burmese community” to speak of in England. Dave’s skin is brown, but raised by a single mother in a poky country town and burnished, however brutally, by the British public (i.e., private) school system, he’s nothing but English inside. Even so, Dave never forgets—and never is allowed to forget—that he’s an outsider in the only culture he’s ever known, not just brown but lower middle class, the son of a dressmaker. He’s forever jumping up to open doors for ladies and to help with the dinner dishes.
Still, Dave’s exquisite, deferential politeness often conceals the barbs of an underling more clever than his ostensible superiors. He attains a certain popularity at school by reading aloud P.G. Wodehouse stories at lunch, cannily imitating the actors in a BBC television series of the time, and delighting his classmates with his Jeeves impersonation and ability to raise just one eyebrow. This provides Dave with an inkling of his future: “That was the lesson—not just to give something it turned out they liked, but to have them hungry for something I’d given them before: it was stardom.”
The first dozen chapters of Our Evenings, devoted to Dave’s school days in the 1960s, set up the rest of the novel, but they are, because of his passivity, the least engaging parts of the book. Persevere! Once Dave gets to Oxford and begins his adult life, the narrative firms up and draws the reader on with a steady momentum. There’s a long party scene at a group house: a huge, poorly maintained old mansion in the hills belonging to one of his well-born chum’s relatives, where Hollinghurst deftly teases out all the submerged relationships among the friends. “The whole comfortable confident neglected mood was of the 1920s,” Dave observes, “with just a few signs of the late 1960s Walt had whimsically evoked, a small color TV on the right of the fireplace, a turntable with the lid raised and Disraeli Gears on the mat.”
Music serves as a model and motif for Our Evenings, its chapters more like symphonic movements than an unbroken narrative. So does Anthony Powell’s classic novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, which traces one man’s life through childhood, university, war, bohemia, marriage, career, and old age, observing how people move in and out of our ambits, drifting away only to return much later, transformed by the years and yet also somehow the same.
Dave has another, less visible quality that places him askew to the surrounding social order, at least in his youth: the sexuality concealed by what he describes as “the clever but involuntary disguise of being already conspicuous for something else.” At Oxford, where his orientation is at once accepted and slightly stigmatized, he pines for a straight guy too kind to conclusively reject him. In London, where he becomes a professional actor, he strikes up a relationship with a civil servant who lives with a blowsy but encouraging landlady who’s impressed by Dave’s minor role in a sitcom, but not impressed enough to prevent her from charging him rent for spending the night when he’s not on tour.
Soon Dave has landed in an avant-garde theater troupe in which cast members are often expected to take off their clothes, and Our Evenings’ account of those years and the pretensions of 1970s artistic radicals is often very funny. He is clearly talented, but in a period before colorblind casting, his race limits the roles he’s allowed to play in mainstream production. Dave has an affair with a fellow cast member, a Black man who exhibits the focus and ambition that Dave himself—for all his facility at his art—lacks, and with whom he witnesses a more egregious form of British racism. (That lover goes off to America and becomes a movie star.) And while Dave doesn’t spend much time examining the nature of his art, readers will notice that it bears a surprising resemblance to Hollinghurst’s own. Both actors and novelists capitalize on their knack for closely observing the behavior of others. Eagle-eyed Dave clocks the “furious” way a columnist’s wife refuses a tray of canapés, and he delivers this finely turned description of an encounter, in middle age, with a man who had been one of the chief bullies at boarding school:
He was fat, fashionless, red-faced, with a gratifying air of having gone wrong, perhaps without knowing it himself, but something bothered him. He smiled narrowly as he came up, didn’t shake my hand but touched my shoulder, and nodded as he gazed at me. The old hatred was there, it was our element, but I saw him enjoying his thin pretense that he’d moved on.
Such passages of precise and perceptive social dissection are what the Hollinghurst fan lives for, but Our Evenings has its moments of straightforward ravishment as well. His allegiance to sheer beauty balances the tartness of his observations of class, as when, after Dave’s mother’s death, a friend unearths from a closet the traditional silken Burmese wrap she would bring out on “rare reckless evenings”:
It felt known and not quite known, because it was what it had always been, not what I remembered, though now as it ran through my hands, it brought with it the shadows and gleams of days I had utterly forgotten, and which were lost again four or five seconds later.
The love between Dave and his mum lies at the heart of Our Evenings. It’s a love full of mysteries, its key points occluded by English reticence, from Avril’s reason for going to Burma to the true identity and fate of Dave’s father and the nature of their affair. The novel features Hollinghurst’s first extended depiction of same-sex love between women, in Avril’s longtime pairing with her business partner, and an unqualified appreciation of her own modest craft, the stylish clothes she made for villagers who could barely appreciate them. The novel is dedicated to Hollinghurst’s own mother, who died at 97, just as he began writing it.
Hollinghurst’s earlier novels contained quite a bit of explicit sex, and the desires of many of the narrators of those novels gravitated to dark-skinned men. Though in Our Evenings the author tends to pan away to the fireplace just as things start revving up, he shows a new interest in imagining what it might be like to be on the receiving end of such desires: “I sat down again on the hard fauteuil,” Dave recalls, “with a deepening certainty of being not only an interesting young man but a particular type of young man that was especially interesting to Derry.”
The evenings in the book’s title allude both to the intimate happiness of domestic life and to the particular mood that prevails as something draws to an end. (It’s also the evening of English culture and politics, the decline from the benevolent Mark to the stupid and self-important Giles.) But along with the softened light of evening comes the inclination to contemplate, to consider and to explore the perspectives of people who once felt like merely the supporting characters in our own lives. Hollinghurst, once the fierce and erotic young lyricist of British fiction, is now 70, and Our Evenings—though less urgent than Hollinghurst’s early novels—is a wiser and more generous book all the same. If this is the line of beauty that Hollinghurst’s own evening has brought, then for that we can only be grateful.
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