SOME OF US are still getting over Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library. It’s been nearly forty years since the young aristocrat Will Beckwith sucked and fucked his way through an all-male London on the cusp of the aids epidemic. But for more than a few people I know, phrases from the novel can still conjure, madeleine-style, the Technicolor details of Will’s adventures.
These people will remember, for example, that “almost sick with love” is how Will feels when after long months he sees the cock of his erstwhile boyfriend Arthur held in his “little blue briefs.” And these readers will know that after those briefs come down in a dance club men’s room stall and Will takes the “thick, short, veined shaft” of Arthur’s dick briefly in his mouth, he’ll spin his lover around and press his face into his ass, then slide in “a finger, then two, then three” as “long convulsions” rack Arthur and tears fall from his chin “on to the stretched encumbrance of his trousers and pants” (the men are estranged, and they won’t see each other again after this frenzied non-reunion). These readers will not have forgotten that when Will pauses in his crazed survey to kiss “the submerged pale filament” of the scar on the other man’s neck, he murmurs “Baby . . . Arthur . . . sweetest . . . love” in accompaniment to his lover’s “sniffing and gulping.”
Reviewers made much of the novel’s explicitness when it appeared in 1988. But it was (and remains) harder to acknowledge that Hollinghurst is just freakishly good at writing sex: alive to its crudeness, cognitive turbulence, and emotional ambition. Will wants to turn us on, and turn himself on, with the staccato roughness of “thick” “short” “shaft” and the boastful fairy-tale escalation of “a finger, then two, then three”—and he wants to slow us down with those Latinate “convulsions,” the delicacy of “filament,” the recherché encumbrance of “encumbrance.” And he’s alive to how the whiplash swerve between those registers gets at sex’s comedy: yanking us from rudeness into poetry—even pretension—and back again, the prose captures a wild combination of abstraction and concreteness.
Most of all, Hollinghurst knows that gay sex, like sex generally, is supremely interesting to the people who have it, rich with narrative drama and psychic self-dramatization. Even at sixteen, when I first read these words, I smiled knowingly at the melodramatic idea that one could feel nauseated “with love” at the sight of a nice cock. But the notion also put a knot in my throat—and the string of endearments that closes the passage made me choke up for real. Will had talked himself, and me, too, into the belief that men could really do and say these things to one another. Only a beat later did I register the social coordinates of the encounter, and how they might transform its meaning: Arthur is Black and vastly less financially secure than Will, and we have no idea where his head is in this scene. I still don’t know if his tears are the sexiest or the most brutal thing in The Swimming-Pool Library, but they are certainly the most mysterious and real. The episode holds its meanings like a kind of secret.
If being gay and sixteen in 1988 put one squarely in the catchment zone for this writing, those coordinates weren’t strictly necessary to understanding its power. Nicholson Baker, imagining a conversation with John Updike about recent fiction in his 1991 book U and I, sums up the critical consensus on Hollinghurst: “Once you get used to the initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex, which quickly becomes really interesting as a kind of ethnography, you realize that this is really one of the best first novels to come along in years and years! The guy does everything—dialogue, scenic pageantry, wit, pathos, everything!” Baker’s jocularity acknowledges what it won’t quite say: that the novel’s sex is in no way detachable from its success. Gay sexuality was the energy source powering The Swimming-Pool Library’s full-dress realism, the electric current pulsing through the spaces of postimperial Britain, lighting up not just gay clubs but dinner clubs and gyms and charity schools and council flats and hotels and subways and prisons with a glow of ecstatic attention.
Sex isn’t the only thing Hollinghurst does this well, but it occasions a concentrated display of his gifts: an uncanny ability to match the rhythm of sentences to psychic states; an alertness to the details of sensation—a feel for the temperature not just of bodies but of rooms; a coiled humor that stands back and watches with sympathetic irony the most abandoned acts of self-forgetfulness. Even the hottest scenes in Hollinghurst happen somewhere socially specific (a private London park accessible only to key holders, a tiny attic room used by hotel staff between shifts), so that sex in his work seems both to cancel the world and delineate it more sharply. And even the giddiest couplings in his novels happen between people who can suddenly become opaque to each other. The fantasy of communion is always haunted, and fueled, by the reality of separation. Like the rest of life, sex in Hollinghurst is both fully social and fully solipsistic.
HOLLINGHURST’S POST-SWIMMING-POOL career can seem like one long exhale of a postcoital cigarette. Those novels deepened his investigation of Britain’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries, stretching historically to encompass World War I, Bloomsbury-adjacent London, Tony Blair, and Grindr. Socially, too, his canvas took on unexpected shadings. The astronomically entitled Will Beckwith turned out to be an outlier in Hollinghurst’s fictional universe: the author is evidently as familiar with suburbia as he is with the mansions of the super-rich, and his novels have increasingly centered on middle-class interlopers in the precincts of the ruling class.
And of course, for a long time sex remained key in his work. You could perceive its centrality even through the decorum of his titles, which (until now) have conformed to an unvarying definite-article formula. The obliqueness of The Swimming-Pool Library’s title was a nod to the density of the book’s literary allusions, but also to all its chlorine-flavored gym-shower sex; The Folding Star was a fancy name Milton used for the planet Venus, but it also made you think, inevitably, of the long-desired and eventually much-explored asshole of the narrator’s teenage love object. This principle of equipoise, whereby erudition and smut were held in tension, reached a pinnacle in the Booker Prize–winning The Line of Beauty, whose title referred not just to eighteenth-century art theory but also to a line of cocaine and the curve of a man’s lower back.
But in his last two books, as sex has waned in prominence and the Condition of England has loomed larger, Hollinghurst’s titles have telegraphed something cooler, a little remote. The Stranger’s Child was a phrase from Tennyson, hinting at the novel’s interest in Britain’s outsiders and arrivistes, while The Sparsholt Affair suggested a droll BBC miniseries, the kind with montages of grainy paparazzi photos from the Daily Mail. Both books had erotic secrets at their center, but the sex in question remained largely offstage. The last two novels also share a distinctively chilly narrative structure borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s The Years: each section jumps ahead a couple of decades, so that the people you began to care about in one part of the novel are likely to be peripheral or just dead in the next. The fucking that remains in these books is never being done by a central character, because Hollinghurst has done away with central characters.
The backgrounding of sex in the recent books felt related to the way their big temporal arcs kept readerly investment on ice: these were both clearly deliberate forms of abstemiousness, as if Hollinghurst were trying to wean his readers off the pleasures of the realist novel by not letting them get too close to any fictional person’s pleasure. It was a curiously deflating development. Of one character in The Stranger’s Child, a bored bank clerk in the 1950s, we read that “half the time he had a half-erection, seen by no one, caused by no one, under the counter.” It’s an apt image for the place of sex in the recent books: little boners popping up along a vast timeline, signifying nothing, pointing nowhere. Also a pretty great image, it’s true, for the specifically gay erection, which isn’t making anything new except its own pleasure. It’s a bracingly clear-eyed vision of queerness unredeemed by fantasies of cultural continuity, grimly appropriate for the English-language novelist who has done the most to elaborate the fantasy life of gay sex.
One can admire the rigor of Hollinghurst’s demystifying project in these books even as one regrets the light frost it has cast over his fictional world. His narrative eye has lately been fixed at the altitude of the nation, which looms larger than any of its inhabitants. If readers of the early books are invited to lie back, the recent novels ask us to think of England.
SO THE TITLE of Hollinghurst’s new book is its first surprise. Our Evenings, with its pronoun suggesting the novel will emanate from a first-person narrator, strikes a disconcertingly intimate note. Hollinghurst’s master Henry James called the first-person novel “a form foredoomed to looseness,” and Our Evenings is indeed Hollinghurst’s lumpiest book, ragged and sometimes meandering. It is also his most inviting novel in years, life-shaped and strange. After decades, Hollinghurst has put a book back in the hands of someone in particular.
The half-Asian David Win is the only first-person narrator Hollinghurst has given a novel over to in thirty years, and his first non-white protagonist. In another white writer this decision could feel like a technical challenge, or a political one. In Hollinghurst, for whom the whiteness of the narrative perspective has been a kind of first principle, it’s these things but also something more intimate and challenging. From the first lines of The Swimming-Pool Library, where Will stares hungrily at a “severely handsome” Black transit worker dozing on a late-night subway, the white men of Hollinghurst’s most electric books have been transfixed by men of color. In this context David Win feels both like a natural next step and an almost unthinkable one. Reading a novel in his voice is like watching a writer attempt to see the world from the far shore of his own desire.
David’s race is so seamlessly and subtly represented that at first you think Hollinghurst is underplaying it. The son of a white British dressmaker and a Burmese bureaucrat who may or may not have been a spy and who may or may not have been murdered during his nation’s independence movement, David stands out in his provincial English hometown. But in other ways his childhood resembles several of Hollinghurst’s previous protagonists, suburban kids who make it to Oxford and an eventual career in the arts. The reticence his mother Avril cultivates about her time as a secretary in Rangoon and her marriage to David’s father (a silence David calls “a strong mutation of maternal power”) is doubled by Hollinghurst’s refusal to make this backstory a narrative fulcrum. In his childhood home, David’s difference is a matter of stray details: a mantelpiece photograph of his handsome father, the colorful longyis that Avril sometimes dresses them both in. As a scholarship kid at the exclusive Bampton School, David spends a few afternoons furtively paging through books about Southeast Asia—“I didn’t want anyone to know that my smug-looking silence on the subject was ignorance”—but his research is desultory. When he travels to Asia as a successful actor later in life, he never visits the country of his birth.
And yet the issue of David’s race pervades the novel. Hollinghurst’s gift for notating social atmospherics registers its quiet omnipresence. “This is my son David,” Avril tells a new client who has cocked her chin quizzically (“as if detecting a small problem”) on seeing the brown teenager in her seamstress’s house. Avril’s next remark—“David is in his first year at Bampton School”—is engineered to preempt potential unpleasantness. “Our unspoken tactic,” David explains, “was to assume that any person thrown by my appearance was puzzled by something else, and to solve that other puzzle for them; there was nothing they could say then.” David is intuitively aware that his race is less a flat datum about him than an element of the story he shares with his mother: their shared problem, or project. Their togetherness creates a ceaseless flow of tense little social moments, as when Hollinghurst records the various ways the families at a school cricket match look at them: “noting, or staring, or smiling indulgently.” That precisely etched gallery of social response is typical of Hollinghurst’s economy, which here opens a whole ambiguous climate (cool observation, racist hostility, liberal self-congratulation, and some shimmeringly unknown remainder) around this child-and-mother pair and “the puzzle that we always represented.”
That puzzle becomes the emotional core of the first third of the novel. Avril is beautifully delineated: a woman for whom frank discussion is “avoided in all private areas” but whose independence of mind is signaled first by her marriage, then by her undramatic but palpable devotion to David, and finally by the relationship she forms with a wealthy divorcée (she of the cocked chin)—a relationship, we understand before David does, that soon becomes sexual. The early part of the novel thus turns on a kind of mystery, one that retains its enigmatic force even after the reader solves it. As David is increasingly wrapped up in adolescent crushes (on a hairy-legged teacher with whom he listens to classical records, a broody Italian waiter at a seaside resort, Tom Jones singing on the TV in “scandalous trousers”), Hollinghurst shades in his protagonist’s slow awareness of his mother’s more-than-fantasized homosexuality.
The narrative technique here is twisty and strange: David remembers his younger self’s erotic daydreams even as he records—without flagging it for our attention—Avril’s silent noticing of them. At this late stage in the history of the gay coming-of-age plot, the genre should be exhausted. And yet Hollinghurst has invented a new form for it, taking the smoldering self-absorption of the closet and using it to throw light on its surroundings. As Avril moves into the kind of queer relationship he covets, David’s first feeling is that he is “losing her”—even as the coterie of women who begin to frequent the house make him feel “rather brusquely welcomed” into a new world of permissiveness. The open secrets of mother and son dart around each other; the resulting relationship is startlingly moving in its complicated mundanity. “I wondered,” David says when he introduces Avril to his first boyfriend (a sweetly unremarkable civil servant, a white guy who writes David sublimely filthy letters), “whether her idea of a gay man wasn’t something a bit odder than this, if she wasn’t rather worried, now she’d met Chris, that I would soon be as bored by him as she was.” The wryness avows this mother and son’s opacity to each other and gestures almost embarrassedly at their unspoken solidarity. We feel with surprising force that Avril and David like each other—and marvel at how rarely this is compellingly depicted in fiction.
THE PHRASE “our evenings” echoes through the book. You can almost miss its first appearance, in a flatly descriptive account of life with a working mother: “In the holidays she was still working, and our evenings were the time we had together.” Later, when we learn that “Our Evenings” is the name of a piano piece by the Czech composer Leoš Janáček that David listens to with that hirsute boarding-school teacher, the phrase stretches to encompass our narrator’s cultural and erotic ambitions. Years later, when an older David puts on a faux-tragic voice to tell an acquaintance that “our evenings are rarely our own,” we hear it as a thespian’s saw about the hours kept by those who live by the boards.
This final meaning enfolds those previous ones. Sexuality, race, class aspiration: the whole checklist of what could antiseptically be called the novel’s “issues” is set into excited, messy motion by David’s theatrical vocation. An early scene hints at the rage and intelligence at the root of his gift, as he first flatly records an uncle’s fake-warm Christmas greeting (“Look who it is! You made it then!”) and then goes on to tell us how, in his mind, he could refashion this unpleasant social reality: “I had a momentary, almost musical sense of how the two phrases could have been spoken, with warmth and relief.” When David starts imitating his schoolteachers, he knows that the power of the comedy is heightened by his race: “My face took the hint of my voice, seemed to soften and reshape itself into these middle-aged white men.” His skill as an actor is not just the natural result of an outsider status that makes him a forced observer but a delicious form of revenge, a channel for his aggression and confidence, a way for a frequently invisible man to honor what he calls “the secret exhibitionist in me.”
The words are a good description of a first-person narrator, that personage who at least since Jane Eyre has been a spotlight-hogging wallflower. Set in that lineage, David’s vocation is a reflection on the fiction-maker’s art generally, and Hollinghurst’s in particular. David’s life in the theater is a conduit for what is most pleasurable in Hollinghurst’s writing. All of his books have featured hyperliterate characters, along with practitioners or critics of various arts (painters, literary biographers, antiques dealers, music lovers). But these pursuits seem two-dimensional in the face of David’s craft. The hero of Our Evenings knows as much about books as his predecessors, but his profession gives him a rough-and-ready, hands-on relation to literary tradition: Racine, Shakespeare, and company are not only texts to cite or dream about but projects to get your hands on, worlds to put on, scenes to set moving.
The theater is such a compelling space in the novel that it’s no surprise that when David abandons Chris it’s for a fellow actor named Hector. More talented than David and more dedicated to succeeding, Hector is also Black—a fact that draws the men together and drives them apart (especially as Hector, frustrated by the puny parts he’s offered, disappears into his ambition). They fall in love abruptly and essentially in public, rehearsing a scene for their experimental theater company. “I saw tears in his eyes which I knew weren’t simply a tribute to my skills or the playwright’s,” David recalls. “We looked at each other as we might have done after a great argument in real life, and also with a kind of wonder, amorous and half-doubting, at what we had just done together.” (Their director condemns their overacting as a “public wank.”) The importance of theater in Our Evenings puts the energies of sex back at the center of Hollinghurst’s fictional world.
It’s not just that the intensity of David and Hector’s coupling is accentuated by their shared profession, or that David’s vocation is connected to his sexual confidence (he becomes notorious for “getting his kit off” onstage). It’s that the theater, like sex, is an immersive social game that can always veer off script—an activity where a wild sense of pleasure and power are always haunted by a suspicion of not quite knowing what’s going on or whether it’s working. Our Evenings is sexy like that. The novel radiates, page-to-page, a sense of improvisational give and risky possibility.
THE VIBRANCY with which Our Evenings follows David’s life and career made me forget for long stretches the novel’s framing conceit—that he is writing these memoirs in response to the death of his benefactor Mark Hadlow, a wealthy liberal whose family has sponsored his education. Mark’s son Giles was David’s tormenter at school. A racist bully as a kid, Giles grows into a powerful Boris Johnson–like politician, a philistine Brexiteer who ascends, obscenely, to a position as minister for the arts.
The issue of bad men in high places is a topical one. But the book never really follows through on the early suggestion that it will track David’s life in counterpoint to that of his childhood rival. The Hadlow parents pop up in several memorable interludes, their status as “enlightened plutocrats” occasioning some uneasy comedy. But the vile Giles never comes into focus as a worthwhile object of the story’s attention. You get the sense that Hollinghurst is only intermittently interested in his malevolence.
Still, I slowed down as I approached the conclusion, gripped by an anxiety that the novel wasn’t really going to let David’s story float free of the bigotry embodied in his childhood acquaintance. Hollinghurst has wrapped up some of his best books with a jolt of melodrama: moments of metaphorical or physical violence that seem to descend on the story out of nowhere but that, once you think about the social forces they index, retain a sickening verisimilitude. When, close to the book’s end, David’s story is swallowed by a similar cataclysm, a new understanding of the title announces itself: Our Evenings isn’t just about the intimacy of mothers and sons, of lovers and performers, but about the boundaries of the nation, about who will find shelter in that ambiguous pronoun and who will be brutally excluded.
I still don’t know whether the ending “works,” whether its cruelty is necessary or gratuitous. But the savage finality of it sent me paging back to an earlier scene, a piece of everyday theater brimming with improvisation, desire, and danger. It’s how I wanted to remember the book.
David and Hector, still holding their fraying relationship together, have gotten into a crowded late-night subway car. Hector has just performed in another insultingly tiny role and he falls, fatigued, into a seat, oblivious to the grocery-laden white woman who looks longingly at the spot he’s taken. A jolt throws the standing David against a crop-haired white man, who grimaces at him; David scowls back, even as he notes “the powerful presence of his shoulders and his broad arse. . . . It was the old business of carefully avoiding a contact I could justly be accused of wanting, though he worried me more than he turned me on.” Hector observes this last silent exchange and then rests his head against the window to nod off. “All I could see,” David tells us,
with my arm raised to the strap above, was the shoulders of the man I was trying not to press against, and beyond him the white woman peering down now and then at the black man who she thought should have offered her his seat. I couldn’t tell if Hector was actually asleep. The white man nodded scornfully at him, the woman gave a nervous smile, half-grateful, half-bothered by his taking her part: he was very close to her.
The scene reprises the long-ago opening of The Swimming-Pool Library, where Will gazed across a subway car at a sleeping Black worker. Hollinghurst has taken the ravenous one-way sight line of that inaugural moment of his fictional career and multiplied it, turning a fantasy duet into a piece for four, busy with ricocheting lines of attraction, resentment, threat, alliance. Despite its menace, the moment exhilarates: an offhand tour de force, an emblem of Our Evenings’s endless dramatic energy. “In my own trance of exhaustion and discomfort,” David Win says, “I saw clearly the potential of the scene.” Maybe nothing will happen, but almost anything could.
David Kurnick is the author of The Savage Detectives Reread (Columbia University Press, 2022).