Gay life, fine art, and the British class system have been mainstays of Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction since his dizzyingly explicit debut novel, 1988’s The Swimming-Pool Library. Hollinghurst’s earliest work fizzed with the energy of a newly acquired freedom to describe what gay men do together in a style many regard as the most elegant in contemporary English. Over four decades and seven novels, the balance among his three themes has shifted, reaching its perfect equilibrium in his masterpiece, 2004’s The Line of Beauty, winner of the Booker Prize. With Hollinghurst’s latest novel, Our Evenings, class—and its subtle, typically unspoken strictures—now predominates. The result is a lovely, elegiac consideration of how people find happiness in the margins and crannies of the mainstream, and how fragile that joy can be.
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