Dave Win, the son of a a Burmese man he's never met and a British dressmaker, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities emerge, even as Dave is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates. The novel follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.
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.
