Critics love Alan Hollinghurst’s work. They receive every new novel with rapturous reviews. They applaud the elegance of his prose, the emotional precision of his observations, the brilliance of his characterizations, and celebrate him as the great chronicler of gay lives and experience in recent decades. His most recent novel, Our Evenings, has been greeted in very much the same vein, with some critics saying it is his best yet.

We meet Dave Win at the beginning of the novel looking back on his early life from the vantage point of middle age. With an English mother and an absent Burmese father, Dave’s dark skin makes him a target at a rural boarding school in postwar England. Dave is a scholarship boy of very limited means (his mother is a seamstress), and the beneficiary of a rich patron’s generosity. His school friends are well aware of his precocious intelligence and his relative poverty, and his status as the outsider looking on from the sidelines is confirmed as he moves to Oxford. He excels there as a student actor and, after university, drifts into acting jobs in television and theatre.

I felt peculiarly detached from Our Evenings. It was easy to admire Hollinghurst’s style, but little here really engaged me, other than perhaps the touching portrayal of Dave’s love for his mother. I think that may be because so much of the ground felt well trodden by novelists of the past. The man, defined as an outsider by his race, skin color, social class, and sexuality, looking into, but never fully joining, the lives of his “betters” is a theme that many others have felt drawn to, and it takes some special ingredient to elevate it to somewhere that feels new and special. I could not detect or experience that ingredient and I closed the book at the end with a feeling of admiration but no real sense of immersion.