Ruminative ... Impeccable restraint ... As the book moves away from adolescence, it grows less novelistic and more episodic. The early memories, which appear as though polished to a high sheen over the decades, give way to those sharply remembered experiences of adult life ... Funny ... The miracle of Our Evenings, though, is its elegance and transparency, its ability to capture in language both revelatory and natural exactly what Dave is thinking and feeling all the way into his 70s.
A lovely, elegiac consideration of how people find happiness in the margins and crannies of the mainstream, and how fragile that joy can be ... 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 ... A wiser and more generous book ... If this is the line of beauty that Hollinghurst’s own evening has brought, then for that we can only be grateful.
The book contains moments of extraordinary beauty and set pieces as powerful as anything Hollinghurst has written ... Too often sex writing is judged merely by how sexy it is. In Our Evenings, Hollinghurst shows how much else it can convey: distraction, estrangement, a fond attentiveness ... For all these strengths, however, the book is oddly lacking in cumulative force; in place of direction and momentum, there is simply an exquisite drift ... Frustrating...especially from a writer who once set his work in that uncertain territory beyond good and evil.
Languorous, elegant ... No page-turner; it moves with the heavy tread of a royal procession. It insists on patience as it doles out its pleasures ... That rare bird: a muscular work of ideas and an engrossing tale of one man’s personal odyssey as he grows up, framed in exquisite language.
Gains momentum as it goes on, flowering finally into something sadly beautiful — a meditation on growing old, the mutability of relationships, and the fragility of social progress, framed by the world-on-fire mood of the present. Like old age itself, it just takes a while to get there ... It’s when Dave comes to sexual consciousness that Hollinghurst really starts cooking ... The weaknesses of the first half of Our Evenings underscore Hollinghurst’s great strength: He is deeply, brilliantly a writer of adult relationships ... Like life, the book has an effect of accumulation, scattered scenes building toward something with real emotional weight.
ollinghurst has chosen to write solely in the first person, no doubt partly to avoid the objectivizing gaze Dave is subjected to throughout his life. It is the right choice, giving direct access to the pain of the visceral slight, or to wry, personal observation, but it does lead to a certain mutedness in the author’s palette ... With Dave becoming settled and content, the second half of the book, which runs through the five decades of his adulthood, loses momentum. The final twist, though shocking and thematically coherent, feels like a belated attempt to reinject some vigor.
It should be noted that Hollinghurst’s prose is as vivid and exact as ever, his youthful virtuosity long since broken in, and the narrative rhythms so smooth that this rather long book can be read with speed and ease; his evocation of the worlds through which David passes is the usual persuasive combination of experience, observation, empathy and what one assumes is research ... The novel’s main interest in David’s racial heritage is the bigotry it provokes. In other words, how it makes him a victim. As a gesture of solidarity with those who have to put up with racism, this is ambiguous, to say the least.
His longest and most stately production yet, the measured, deliberate work of an experienced artist who refuses to be rushed. Vaulty and voluminous, Our Evenings is dense with images, detail, and luscious description ... While sentence after sentence glints with wry humor and ironic observation, its overall structure is tragic, and the ripped-from-the-headlines coda is likely to be controversial ... Mowing the lawn and playing on it at the same time: the co-presence of work and play, pleasure and repair. This modest image distills the union of aesthetic consciousness and political responsibility that Hollinghurst has achieved in this novel, which takes the measure of art’s marginality while finding in art the seeds of our collective future.
Not Hollinghurst’s strongest book, but it may be his saddest, with its sense of what James called 'muddlement' and of lives never quite fulfilled ... By the final pages, you may find yourself wondering whether Hollinghurst’s sense of loss might extend to his own exhilarating early days, when in writing about gay life there were still boundaries to be broken.
Beautifully observed ... Shifts forward in time are managed gracefully, without hand holding, the reader expected to catch up themselves. Scenes are short and stylish, full of artful moments ... By the end of the book, the reader will feel bereft of Dave’s company, like an old friend has moved on.
Deliciously uncinematic ...The events keep coming, but the quiet moments that receive such loving attention are the real treasure ... Some of the book’s funniest and most pleasurable moments come when the erudite, charming Dave allows himself a cattily polite barb ... Grand.
At his best Hollinghurst is almost Austenian in his eye for social comedy ... Indeed a progress, both of a single life and the country in which it is consummated. But the strongest novels, including some of Hollinghurst’s own, don’t just track a sequence of episodes, they shamelessly manipulate time and character, the better to lend expectation and propulsion to the plot ... A page turner but in a dutiful rather than a compulsive way. A succession of memorial services close the arc of the story but whomever the eulogies are for, when you close the book, you’re not going to miss them that much.
Written in sentences that are often arch and always effortless, it’s a remarkable, richly humane novel ... Hollinghurst variously shows how honed his craft is; how brilliantly he can bring life to wildly different milieu and experiences ... Hollinghurst’s great theme here – examined tenderly and reverently, a delicate thing held up to the light for best inspection – is love.
Shows no decline in elegance, rather a deepening of his interest in what were once secondary themes in his writing: ageing, disappointment, loss ... Stripped of the distractingly racy passages Hollinghurst once wrote so well, there is nothing in Our Evenings to attract attention away from his other virtues as a keen noticer, infinitely sensitive to landscapes, colours, textures, able to convey the most delicate of sensations and emotions.
Hollinghurst unfolds a sequence of superbly realised scenes ... Capacity for appreciation acquires new emotional and political meaning here, in the finest novel yet from one of the great writers of our time.
Stately, elegiac ... There is an unmistakable sense that Hollinghurst, now 70 and in the foothills of old age himself, has mellowed, his once sharp prose softened into something more languid and reflective ... A novel about acceptance: of time’s passage, of life’s limitations, of the small victories that make existence meaningful. Hollinghurst has aged alongside his characters, and his prose has aged with him. What emerges is a work of quiet power, a novel that finds its emotional weight not in dramatic confrontations but in the slow, steady accumulation of a life.
He’s a brilliant writer. This is an extraordinary novel from Booker Prize–winner Hollinghurst...memorably conceived, beautifully executed, and a gift to lovers of serious literary fiction. Every aspect is flawless: complex, multi-dimensional characters, subtle treatment of emotions, beautiful writing, a vividly realized theatrical setting, and more.
