Alan Hollinghurst’s novels tend to appear at “spacious intervals of six or seven years”, said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian. His latest – his first since “The Sparsholt Affair” (2017) – is a “compellingly fresh” bildungsroman, narrated by a gay, half-Burmese actor named Dave Win, who is looking back on his life from late middle age.
We first glimpse Win as a 13-year-old, visiting the posh family that has funded his scholarship to a public school in Berkshire. Next, we meet him aged 14 on summer holiday in Devon, mesmerised by the “parade of known and unknown men”.
Subsequent episodes recount undergraduate days in Oxford, early “theatrical triumphs” in London, a passionate relationship with another actor named Hector, who “leaves Dave behind”, heartbroken. And there’s a “tender” portrait of his “intensely private” mother, Avril. Through it all, what stands out is Hollinghurst’s “capacity for appreciation”: this is a novel that luxuriates in “the inexhaustible particularity” of people. It may be his “finest” yet.
As you’d expect, there are many “brilliantly observed” scenes, said Simon Schama in the Financial Times. No writer is better than Hollinghurst at evoking the “feel of things”, and his eye for social comedy is “almost Austenian”. Yet ultimately, “Our Evenings” suffers from being not much more than a “sequence of episodes”. Over its 500-odd pages, Win’s self-portrait becomes “oddly anaemic”.
I disagree, said Valentine Cunningham in Literary Review. There is “narrative magic” in Win’s recollections. A “wonderful example” of what Hollinghurst has always been good at, this novel also adds a welcome “new note”: a moving sense of “time’s depredations, and the inevitability of ageing and mortality”.