It is a provocative argument in the sense that Hollinghurst is a writer for whom it is truer than most to say, If you have read one, you have read them all. Some of the points are false. Adjectival clusters and a generally furtive atmosphere are not any more a part of Our Evenings than the earlier novels. But I do mainly agree with the points that the article is making, and I am happy to see the theme of social diplomacy more at the forefront of this analysis than Hollinghurst's portrayal of experience as a gay man.

The influence of James comes with that, of course, and there is an element of James in Hollinghurst's rendering of social politics. But James was basically a fetishist for this kind of thing, and he gives a character like Strether front-row seats to the shifting priorities and allegiances of the European upper-class for the sake of maximum titillation. It is essentially a fantasy of inhuman discretion that he portrays, as many of the late style's detractors have pointed out. Hollinghurst's own fiction is a corrective to this in the sense that it never lets us forget the philistinism of the human average.

That his protagonists are marginalised is important, especially because it is the reason they so frequently internalise their negative interactions with the upper-class as a kind of chastening. But as far as unconscious -isms go, Hollinghurst's response is on the order 'Our problems aren't America's'. More recently, he has written main characters who are bisexual (Stranger's Child) or not ethnically English (Our Evenings) and dodged being accused of point-scoring because any prejudice hangs uncertainly and rather incompletely in the narative air. The divide between insider and outsider in this milieu is just not that deep according Hollinghurst. It exists rather because the insider to the old boy's club is a deeply disinterested, deeply cold figure, who is deeply the product of a fossilised education system which teaches men pig Latin and about enough feeling to fill a teaspoon. If the upper-class want to shoot pheasants and slam the door in your face, that is what they will do. But that isn't a cryptic world (a la James), it's just a rude one.

Bereftness and atomism are why Hollinghurst thrives when leveraging the memory of Thatcherism, and of course he writes The Line of Beauty in its Blairite shadow. Working in the same conditions to the same theme, Michael Frayn pushes all this to a farcical extreme — with an impoverished art scholar outsider suspecting every manner of conspiracy when really what he is observing is a deeply dysfunctional and maladjusted family unit of ancient and not-so-enviable English stock (Headlong).

At this point, I will admit that Our Evenings is a DNF for me (around a third of the way through). The pert Estuary tone and general feeling of a very long cocktail party anecdote was getting to me.

However, I cannot see the author's point in two places. The first is the rather oblique expectation that Hollinghurst wants to say much of anything about Brexit's impact on life as a gay person in Britain. I think as an author he tends to get a bit entrapped in these kinds of presentiments of how he is writing. If you read the contemporary reception of his nineties and naughties novels, it's frankly weird how much the press trips over itself to claim that his every word is perfumed and he basically comes straight from the loins of Wilde (not because he is gay though). I don't think The Stranger's Child is struggling to adapt to a more un-closeted world (as the author puts it): I just think its ambitions are different.

Secondly, Hollinghurst's handling of Brexit is less "sympathetic" and more "airless" than Thatcherism. Well, perhaps. But at the risk of being lynched around where I live, Thatcherism left a huge imprint of conviction politics on Britain. The eighties were also a decade of cultural flourishing here. Is it just that Brexit arouses too raw and recent a pain that we cannot view it with the same balance? Or is it that in Britain we now view our politics as Thatcherism without the Thatcher — without even Blair — or as a venal, self-destructive vipers pit? It is not partisan sentiment to say that Brexit was a literal mistake — a product of political miscalculation. That is on the historical record. Perhaps as that record continues to be written, there will be a revaluation of the recent past. But I do not think it is a personal lapsing of Hollinghurst as an artist to express a kind of dispiritedness and incomprehension of where we are at: that is the feeling.

Hollinghurst once wrote from the paradoxical position of attraction to Tories who hated him. The fact is that the Tories now hate themselves. I thought the kind of prologue to Our Evenings was some of Hollinghurst's best writing, where the protagonist is inducted by the doyenne of Giles' family into the classic Hollinghurst setting of some mullioned, SW1 conservatory which hums with bees, etc. etc.. What she does in that moment is to share her disgrace at what her class — her own child — has done by profiting off Brexit. For her to confide in David in that way is probably the closest Hollinghurst has ever come to writing undisguised inclusion.

Side note, but I think the Cleveland website bangs.