Our Evenings
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.
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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.
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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.
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