Our Evenings, Alan Hollinghurst

Often these days, when reading a novel, I wonder where the editors have gone.  

Hollinghurst is a good writer, but also a self-indulgent one.  I read these almost 500 pages in a night, but only by skipping huge swathes where I just lost interest in the characters and what they were doing, or who they were doing it to.  There are beautiful, striking passages, so perhaps it is just me, another victim of the 21st century inability to concentrate for more than an Instagram post.  At least I gave this novel a good go.  Often these days, after I have read the first fifty pages and the last fifty, I decide that life is just too short to waste any more time.

This is a novel, apparently of ‘privilege and prejudice.’   To me it all seems rather far-fetched.  Not that life is not far-fetched, but for me, a novelist’s job is to make it feel not so.  I could not believe in how Dave’s mother, Avril, became involved with Esme – perhaps as it was never really explained -, or how she was involved with Dave’s Burmese father – also sketched in the most inconclusive way, perhaps as a contrast to the detail that is provided about David’s own love affairs.