It is hard to think of another living writer who produces structures as ebullient and dirigiblelike as Alan Hollinghurst does. His first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), depicts London streets, tube stops, pubs, and gym locker rooms as an infinitely detailed region of aspiration, desire, and finely tuned observation. In The Stranger’s Child (2011), poetry isn’t a matter of words on pages, but how those words pulse with physical and emotional resonance over a century of insular Oxbridge social life. In fact, it’s hard to think of anybody else today who writes what Henry James would describe as a contemporary “romance,” work so filled with self-sustaining imagination that it lifts off the ground and takes you to places not entirely of this world.

His new novel, Our Evenings, recounts a young man’s coming of age (and eventual coming into old age), and like most of Hollinghurst’s fiction, it’s about living one’s life for beautiful things: music, paintings, theater, architecture, and other people (especially, in this case, beautiful male people). In his evenings, David Win seeks ephemeral (and largely indefinable) pleasures. The son of an adventurous seamstress and a Burmese man he never meets, he spends his first several years with his mother, watching her create her unusual and inventive dresses and scarves, wandering the streets with her, or watching Hollywood movies at the local cinema. Later, he passes evenings at the Record Club, where, in the company of his possibly too attentive male tutor, he enjoys the piano music of Janáček. (One of the tunes—a reflective, occasionally discordant solo piece—is itself entitled “Our Evenings.”)

Still later, his evenings are occupied by his performances with a traveling theater troupe, as he learns his way from one long-term sexual relationship to another. (In this cautious approach to relationships, he is quite unlike William Beckwith, the protagonist of The Swimming-Pool Library, who never seems to visit a London square or tube stop without finding a man he wants to take home.) Eventually, there are evenings of approaching old age, when the people he loves are starting to die all around him, and David begins assembling his memoirs.

Our Evenings is a much calmer, cooler novel than Hollinghurst’s best-known works. While most of it takes place in David Win’s youth, the most striking passages develop from the long, lyrical, elegiac pages of his late years, as the evenings seem to be passing by more quickly and growing ever more brief. Unlike Will in The Swimming-Pool Library, or Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty (2004), David never turns his back on his family or acts ashamed of them. Being gay and biracial, he has learned to live with (if not accept) the casual racism of his fellow Brits, even while he’s annoyed to be mistaken for biracial actors who don’t look remotely like him.

David spends a lifetime loving a few men wisely and well, but either leaves them for someone else or is left by them in turn—until, by the end of this rich and sometimes aimless novel, the forces of Brexit-adjacent dissolution and rage come gunning for him. Though Our Evenings presents itself as the recollections of a sensitive soul, its political heart seems to beat with the recognition that Britain had something beautiful once and threw it all away. And an elegy is the best that David—and Britain—still have in them for their final evening reflections.

Much like Hollinghurst’s best and wonderfully rereadable Booker-winning fourth novel, The Line of Beauty, Our Evenings is structured around the protagonist’s affection for a well-off, upper-middle-class family, and the shining lives they live inside their decorous homes. Unlike the horrible (while charming) Thatcherite Feddens in The Line of Beauty, Mark and Cara Hadlow are modest, generous, and liberal, and they award David a scholarship that helps him journey far beyond his modest beginnings.

They develop a genuine fondness for David that he reciprocates over several decades, but unfortunately this means he must spend occasional time with their unpleasant, even sadistic son, Giles, whose secret adolescent cruelties won’t be entirely revealed until late in........

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