Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings is a novel of elegance and slow-burning emotional weight. Set in post-war Britain, it follows David Win, a biracial actor whose career and personal life are shaped by race, class, and sexuality. As a scholarship boy at an elite boarding school, David is both an insider and an outsider, navigating the coded prejudices of a society that values his talent but never fully accepts him. His relationships are infused with a longing that Hollinghurst captures magically.
The novel unfolds with the same measured, deeply observant style that made The Line of Beauty and The Stranger’s Child so celebrated. Hollinghurst understands the power of restraint, and here he lets silence and subtext do much of the work. Conversations are loaded, carefully choreographed in ways that reveal as much about what isn’t said as what is. David’s queerness, like his multiracial background, is something others attempt to contain, to define for him. But the novel resists simple categorization, much as its protagonist does.
Hollinghurst’s world is one of polished exteriors and deep undercurrents. Through David’s encounters, with wealthy patrons, with lovers who see him as an exoticized fantasy, with fellow actors who both admire and resent him, the novel examines how identity is constructed and performed. It’s a book about power, not in a blunt political sense, but in the subtler ways people assert dominance over one another through language, maneuvering, and quiet exclusion.
There are moments of incredible beauty, where Hollinghurst’s prose seems to catch light in just the right way, illuminating the fragile connections between people. At times, the novel’s restraint may feel almost too controlled, its pace unhurried to the point of stillness. But for those willing to settle into its rhythms, Our Evenings offers a reading experience that is both intellectually rich and emotionally haunting. It’s a novel that stays with you, not for its grand gestures but for its quiet, indelible truths.
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