Our Fragile Reality
A novel that honors ordinary life, not heroes or villains
There’s something refreshing about illusions falling apart, like so many pixels of a fantasy castle splintering on screen. For weeks now, before the U.S. election on November 5, I’ve battled a panicky descent into cynicism — and yet, I feel more alive than ever. I’m aware of the last golden leaves of autumn, the bushy red crown of a maple about to lose all its grandeur but so explosively glorious in the moment.
Everything fades and changes and sometimes coils back into itself. It’s the elegiac feeling I take away from reading a great novel like Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst. The novels I love best are the ones in which protagonists watch themselves change, or how the stories they tell about themselves change, especially if the world disappoints. They’re aware of what they want but can ultimately never achieve.
I’m captivated by the quest for the deepest self, among all the ever-evolving selves we present to others. And reading Our Evenings (Penguin Random House, 2024), published just this fall, has helped me to address the fragile reality of our present moment. I recognize how we delude ourselves into not asking the right questions. But more than anything, I appreciate the way this book honors the vicissitudes of inner life.
Despite the solace I find in many novels, few bring me to tears as this one did. I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve read and admired other work by Alan Hollinghurst, and halfway through his latest almost-500-page saga, I wanted to give it to every reader I know as a holiday gift. After my initial impulse, though, I realized my response might not be everyone’s. It’s part of what I find so moving in the novel: we ordinary ones each have personal stories to tell, but even when we tell them, we may not be understood.
If nothing else, it’s a rich contrast with the faux personal authenticity of the digital era. If I weren’t a reader of such novels, I’m not sure how I’d contend with the dumbed-down version of reality the media serves up, be it election coverage or the inroads of artificial intelligence into everything we communicate.
Maybe you hear my rage there. It’s like a snake poking its head above the surface, before I shove it down again, and such anger makes almost no appearance in Our Evenings. It’s the monster elided, possibly for good reason.
David Win, a biracial British actor who comes of age in the 1960s, is the first-person narrator and protagonist of Our Evenings. Dave details his life, or some aspects of it, from childhood to old age. At first, an inordinate number of pages appear devoted to his time as a young scholarship boy at Bampton, an elite boarding school, and then Oxford, where he unexpectedly flames out to the backdrop of Cream’s Disraeli Gears.
But that’s why it resembles a recollection of actual life. Those childhood years are often formative. It’s when you learn who you’re supposed to be and what others think of you — when the fragile inner reality you feel is you slams up against the external world. It may well be when you learn to hide your rawest reactions to injustice or humiliation, to square the circle of racism and homophobia in Dave’s case.
In the novel, it eventually becomes clear he’s writing it as a memoir. Some recalled scenes are elliptical. In his seventies, he’s looking back, expressive as the seasoned actor he is but also controlling what’s said, staving off messy shadows. The pacing and emphasis on self-revelation in Our Evenings — vividly described moments of being, combined with moments of cruelty covered by British understatement — underscore a clash of inner longings and family mysteries that are never resolved.
Dave never knows his Burmese father, except through his own imaginings. He spins different versions for schoolmates: his father the fighter pilot — or an assassinated government official — or a spy. His white English mother, who spent a brief time as a young woman in Burma, doesn’t talk about the man or her liaison beyond a few cryptic remarks. Yet when she returns to England, settling in a country town as a skilled seamstress, she and her brown child are both viewed askance.
Of the few “Burmese treasures” his mother preserved in a chest of drawers, some were traditional clothing. As David describes himself:
“[O]nce or twice Mum fixed me up in the gaung-baung and sat me at her dressing table, me in love with this beautiful self, like a brother, in the mirror; Mum tensely admiring me too for a minute, and then quickly undoing it.”
Dave senses early on that he’s gay, another marker of difference. At one point, he and his mother reminisce about when, at six years old, he dressed up in his aunt’s “black evening velvet shoes.” His mother says, “Ah, you were a dear little boy.” Dave mischievously thanks her, sticking out his tongue. But as an adult narrator, he notes what his mother didn’t add: the “stony” reaction of her brother, his Uncle Brian, who later becomes estranged from them: “Ruddy hell, Avril, we’re not in flaming Rangoon now.”
His not-so-secret sexuality is the stuff of male boarding school stories, but more than anything, it’s the hypocrisy of those who assuage their own urges with him that’s a running theme. In particular, there’s his nemesis and schoolmate Giles Hadlow. He’s the son of Mark Hadlow, a wealthy businessman who funds the scholarship program Dave benefits from. Giles the bully goes on to rise through the ranks of conservative British politics as an MP. Dave thinks of gentler Mark, disappointed in his Tory son, as something of a surrogate father. Yet this seems like wishful thinking, too, the kind memoirists fall prey to when they try to fill in their own blanks.
Late in Our Evenings, Dave recounts the eve of the Brexit vote, the most obvious echo of our own culture-shifting moment, when a famous older actor in the cast of the play he’s in admits to voting to “leave” the EU:
“‘It’s the immigration, really. It’s out of control. I’m sorry, Dave,’ he said, as if I were an immigrant myself. ‘I don’t like being bossed around …’”
And then Dave recalls the cast coming back the next morning for rehearsal, the overall “grim mood of defeat, and the prophetic gloom.” He adds in a reference to a much-revered British poet: “Hopkins got it just right, of an earlier disaster: hope had mourning on; hope was twelve hours gone.”1
Is Dave up to the Task?
Reviewer Ron Charles, in his Washington Post piece about Our Evenings and the “genius of Alan Hollinghurst,” wonders if the explicit gay sex scenes in his novels turn off American readers. Charles calls him “Britain’s finest prose stylist,” and he’s right to question why Hollinghurst has not received the recognition in the States he deserves.2 I can’t say the sex scenes have ever put me off. Then again, I became a Hollinghurst fan after I read his 2011 novel The Stranger’s Child, a quasi-Brideshead Revisited epic I stumbled on accidentally in a bookstore.
I suspect the underground aspect of Hollinghurst has to do with how “big” books or novelists are marketed in the U.S. today: the manufactured reality of the author interview and podcast circuit, the anointed few who supposedly represent everyone else in an era in which artists tussle behind the scenes with how much to stray beyond BookTok-approved identity and “authenticity.”
In his New Yorker review of Our Evenings, Giles Harvey also points to what he calls a lack of “cumulative force” in the narrative. “Exactly what we are reading ‘for,’ beyond the crystalline impressions of a sensitive, intelligent man, is never really clear,” he writes. Harvey refers to a common criticism of first-person narrators (he quotes Henry James), noting that “Our Evenings belongs to Dave Win in a way that none of Hollinghurst’s previous novels belong to their main characters.”
This critic goes on to ask, “Is Dave up to the task?,” implying he’s not. But Dave does hold my attention, because I define the “task” differently. I enjoy plotted novels with lots of action, but I have a soft spot for contemplation as well, whether sensitivity to events is recounted by a fictional or nonfictional “I.” In particular, I prefer essays and memoirs that are self-reflective rather than manipulated into false story arcs.
More to the political point, real bullies were on my mind in the run-up to the U.S. election. As I was reading Our Evenings, I found it easy to sympathize with Dave’s travails with Giles Hadlow, even to be gripped by the question of how a minor player in somebody else’s glittering celebrity story is supposed to make meaning of it.
Harvey emphasizes that arrogant, brutish Giles is a cardboard villain — and he is. Yet here’s where a first-person narrator comes in handy. The “I” telling a fictional story can reveal just how much we ordinary souls shadow-box with bogeymen. They aren’t any more real than the politicians and celebrities amplified by social media, but they hijack attention. They take up psychic space, as Giles does for Dave. What Hollinghurst carries off brilliantly in Our Evenings is the way people, in telling their own stories, turn others into flat characters that represent aspects of themselves they can’t express: unbridled rage, the freedom to wreck the system, to kick aside those who challenge you or who simply don’t see you as fully human.
Hollinghurst at seventy, an acclaimed white male novelist, takes an imaginative leap in writing from the point of view of a protagonist of color, but I’m struck by how his first-person narrator conveys an inner world that’s essentially nonheroic. I’m American, white, a woman — different from Hollinghurst’s gay British protagonists — but his novels often make me feel seen from within. Elevating the vulnerabilities so many people try to hide in recounting their lives matters to me, especially now, especially because a novel like Our Evenings is all about the way we create reality.
Gradually and Imperceptibly
When, late in the novel, Dave describes the reading he does from his old copy of Collected Yeats for Mark Hadlow’s memorial, he reflects:
“The book itself when I glanced at it seemed to me a gathering of memorials, of the shadowy years beyond years through which I’d owned it and read it and slipped dog-eared markers between its pages.”
Reviewer Hamilton Cain praises Hollinghurst’s novel in the New York Times as an “exquisite queer odyssey,” but says it’s “no page-turner; it moves with the heavy tread of a royal procession. It insists on patience as it doles out its pleasures.” And that’s when I decided to avoid more reviews. Because this, of course, is the real reason why a novel like Our Evenings fails to grip the audience it deserves: digital impatience.
My own experience of reading the novel was not languorous at all, but the languor evoked by the title is the point. Our evenings and days pass in fits and starts. We never know what’s meaningful, except possibly after the fact. Even then, we might be wrong.
In Our Evenings, a Latin fragment on an old sundial — sensim sine sensu — evokes time passing without our awareness. Once Dave is at school, his mother, who has an untold life of her own, moves in with the woman who becomes her lover, Esme. The sundial is in the garden of Esme’s house, and she shrugs when Dave asks about the motto, one of many such “words of wisdom” carved on sundials of a certain vintage. It’s from a longer phrase by Cicero (sensim sine sensu aetas senescit) that roughly translates as gradually, imperceptibly, we grow older.
Hollinghurst isn’t much older than I am, and perhaps the resonance I feel with his aging protagonist is one that comes with lived experience. I ached with the clarity of Dave’s description of his mother’s last days, when she went through the motions of time passing, watching quiz shows like Countdown and Eggheads:
“Towards the end I felt she had a nearly abstract reliance on the ritual, a satisfaction in it being performed, the combat of questions asked and answered; it became harder and harder to be sure what she actually knew, and perhaps in the last few months, when she was quiet and withdrawn, the familiar stages of the game show, the dismissals, the forced climaxes, the ad-breaks, were above all a pattern and marking out of time for her. There was something to look forward to, then something to be doing, then something that was over and done.”
Such an insight feels endangered by the current push to quantify and optimize outcomes. It’s why I seek the conversation I had with Our Evenings, the spark between writer and reader that makes me think rather than hide. As Masha Gessen,
, and other astute observers have emphasized, we should have no illusions about those in power: they want to mold truth as they see fit. The challenge is how we live forward without normalizing what shouldn’t be normalized — how we hang onto justifiable anger without destroying the joy of being alive.For the moment, I’m reading novels, avoiding screens and news feeds as much as possible. Am I going through the motions? I hope not. I began work on this piece a good week before the election, typing into a file off-line, until I paused, deciding not to publish right away. I wanted to dig deep into something non-political, partly as a coping mechanism, and Our Evenings invites an inner pause. Yet I’m not after a Zen-like calm. I’ll be changed inevitably, we all will, but I hope to keep my eyes open.
I’m lucky to be alive. I realize anew just how insensible I’ve been to passing time. The reality I want and have tried to live seems as fragile as it ever was. Yet living was never something I should have taken for granted. I imagine cradling my words like a child, my sweet ordinary child, even if what I write amounts to crumbling Latin, the meaning soon to be rubbed away.
I want to keep imagining.
The lines are from the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”
Hollinghurst won the Booker twenty years ago for his novel The Line of Beauty, described as “an intricate portrait of class, politics, and sexuality in Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s Britain.”
You've added another writer to my list!
This is beautiful — and beautifully written, too. Thank you for it.