I've blown hot and cold on Rooney in the past, while I think I have never been other than laudatory about Hollinghurst (see here and here). Leaving aside the fact that I'm no doubt terribly prejudiced in his favour because I'm a white male etc etc, I suspect one reason I have for warming to Hollinghurst is a sympathy for his world: while I'm sure that both Hollinghurst and Rooney are immaculately left-wing and believe all the correct things politically, Hollinghurst at least understands the conservative world, in both its lower-case and upper-case "C" incarnations. For example, Hollinghurst's books feature many delicate and sensitive young men people whose eyes are opened to the good things in life (and some of the bad ones too) by a spell at an expensive boarding school, imbibing rich traditions and good taste. Hollinghurst writes about matters such as the English countryside, rich people and grand ducal houses in the manner of someone who has an idea that these things might not be all bad. Conservative politicians are (nearly) real people in Hollinghurstia. The world of Rooney, by contrast, does not have many people who spend their time appreciating Coade stone vases, shall we say.
But I found that things changed somewhat with Intermezzo. In this book, Rooney chooses to describe a world that is much closer to my 'lived experience' (urgh) than her other books; a world even, in some ways, more familiar than Hollinghurst's.
Intermezzo is a story is about two brothers, one of whom is barrister (hey - that's my job too!) and the other of whom plays chess (hey - I play chess too!) to a very high standard (well ...). I recognised Rooney's description of what it is to be a barrister in social terms (although it seems that the Dublin Bar takes a lot more drugs than the London Bar), and I found the chess bits persuasive too (e.g., the idea that you have to learn a whole load of openings just to get to the good bit in the middlegame where you're actually playing). There are even some characters in Intermezzo who listen to proper music and understand why someone might go to church. All of which is to say that we are on somewhat familiar ground with both books and so a fair comparison is, perhaps, possible.
Once one thinks of the two writers inhabiting if not the same world then at least adjoining worlds, then other similarities appear too. One that struck me is that both Hollinghurst and Rooney employ house parties as important dramatic devices. Think of the ones in The Line of Beauty (France), Conversations With Friends (France again) or Normal People (Italy).
Now, I think Hollinghurst is better at 'doing' a house party. To my mind, the best part of Our Evenings is a house party near the beginning in which our hero, David Winn, while still at school, comes to stay with the rich, assured and partly-foreign family that includes the liberal-minded benefactor who endowed David's scholarship and his benefactor's son, a school mate/enemy/[this is a Hollinghurst book - you know what happens] of David. While some writers excel in handling the unit of time that we might call a 'scene' (Tolstoy springs to mind) or even a 'moment', I think Hollinghurst's skill lies in handling that slightly longer period that I would call an 'episode', and this episode is classic Hollinghurst.
The authors' treatment of house parties is quite similar, but they differ in other ways. Let's have brief glimpses at two not-entirely-smooth social encounters much shorter than a house party.
First, Hollinghurst. David's mother's lover (who is a woman - there are very few straight people in the book) has died. She wanted a church funeral, even none of them goes to church, so the vicar has come round to discuss the arrangements. I thought Hollinghurst did this very well: here are some bits taken from a longer but still short (2-3 page) section in which almost every sentence is quotable.
So many nice little observations and turns of phrase here. And then Hollinghurst ends the little passage with this: "I saw that of course she [sc. Annette] would be gathering facts and anecdotes for one of those warm-hearted makeshift addresses in which priests attempt to conjure up a person they haven't known for the benefit of those who have".
That's all very nicely done. But let's notice two points about it.
First, we are clearly in a mind very much like Hollinghurst's. Talking as if casting one's mind back to earlier vicars, the feeling that sherry for the vicar might be satirical, the observation that it's hard to pace a sherry, socially, the whole sensibility of the scene - these are, I think, the thoughts and observations of a writer like Hollinghurst. David Winn, the character through whose eyes we are meant to be seeing, is an actor and he could, for example, have observed something about how Annette peforms the role of the woman priest, or of the stranger in a house of bereavement, or even just her voice and manner. But, at least to my mind, we are seeing the world through the eyes of an observant writer rather than an actor.
My second point is to ask how Hollinghurst uses this passage in the wider context of the book. Not really, is the answer. To be sure, you'll have noticed the comparison of what we might call a 'loud and proud' dog collar to coming out and we do 'get' something out of that: Hollinghurst wraps up the funeral with Annette shaking hands with David and somehow wordlessly conveying admiration for the courageous lesbianism of his mother's lover; and it ends "She [sc. Annette] seemed to look over the fence of her religion, at a freedom she had knowingly denied herself". Again, all very nicely done, I'm sure. But ... that's it. That's all we get out of this lovingly-crafted couple of pages. Our Evenings is a big thick book, hundreds of pages long, but I'm afraid it's full of episode after episode, all 'done' beautifully, but adding up to nothing.
Now let's look at a moment in Rooney. In this scene, the brothers are meeting at a restaurant and this is the beginning of their encounter. (Ivan is the chess-playing younger brother and Peter is the barrister older brother.)
Ignore, for a moment, the silly lack of speech marks and instead look at the description of how Peter comes in and sits down. I thought this cataloguing of Peter's belongings and his impressive performance in dealing with them was a great way of showing us how Ivan sees the world. Peter would not even notice this detail: if pressed to describe what he did, he would perhaps say that he "put his things down". But Ivan notices quite how many things there are and we see what an effort it would be for him to handle them all.
You'll also have seen the time-keeping aspect of things: the mental load that the time has for Ivan compared with Peter's offhandedness is an important detail, again portrayed in part by reference to a physical thing, and it is all very economically done. I can also tell you that Ivan looked at the menu online beforehand and has already chosen what he wants to eat, while Peter will come to the menu fresh. Each of these points, it seems to me, is a great imaginative leap on Rooney's part into the mind of an awkward, geeky young man, notably different from herself, and also into how he might interact with someone more suave and assured.
(Rooney also uses this kind of imagination for comic effect. At one point, Ivan is taking a phone call while his phone is low on battery and attached to a short cable, so he has to sit uncomfortably in order to carry on the conversation. We know that Peter would never be in this position.)
Moreover, Rooney uses these details. There is a episode later on in the book, when things are not going so well for him, during which Peter loses his umbrella. It's just a detail, but it makes a telling contrast with Peter's effortless ability to deal with his umbrella when things are going well. Peter's way with an umbrella gets used twice, not just to tell us about him but also to tell the story, and I thought this was nicely done by Rooney.
This is one example of the way that Intermezzo works much better as a novel than Our Evenings. Intermezzo fits together as a whole and it's pretty clear what it's about. The plot involves complicated sexual shenanigans of the kind we know from Conversations With Friends, but it's a plot nonetheless.
By contrast, as many reviewers have said, Our Evenings is not a very coherent book. You think it is going to be a book about Brexit (our hero's benefactor is a Remainer but his dreadful son is a big noise in Leave), but then the benefactor's family turn out to be no more than large but ultimately incidental characters as our hero sometimes plods and sometimes skips through life. It ends up being unclear what - or even who - the book is really about. It's a book of nicely-done episodes amounting to distinctly less than the sum of its parts.
Intermezzo is worth about the same as the sum of its parts, but it has its flaws too. Quite a bit of it did not convince me. In particular, in common with Normal People, I was not persuaded by the female to male attraction, although for a completely different reason from that in Normal People.
In Normal People, the main woman, Marianne, is a three-dimensional character with a lot going for her (from the male point of view) - I described her as a "potent cocktail", for those with that kind of taste - while the main man, Connell, was a pretty sketchy character with little going for him. It is in some ways the reverse in Intermezzo: both Peter and Ivan are three dimensional characters, with various positive and contrasting attributes, while the women are comparatively sketchy ciphers.
It's still easy to see why the men in Intermezzo like the women: apart from anything else, every single woman in the book is very good-looking. (Our two brothers are adults, so their mother is a woman in late middle-age, but even she is glamorous and good-looking. It is not clear to me why that should be.) The love interest characters are also all appealing in other ways too: Margaret is a nice person, Sylvia is clever and Naomi is fun, I suppose.
But, for all the positive features of the men, the idea that these women would want them was hard to believe. The Peter-Sylvia relationship, a partnership of intellectual and social equals, was closest to ringing true, in my view, but ultimately, even in this case, there was something of the male fantasy to the extent to which she effectively abased herself for a plainly flawed man, especially given the physical reasons that would make her disinclined to make much effort, and the other relationships had even less to offer the woman involved.
(In this respect, Intermezzo reminded me of The Autograph Man: they are both books written by women that nonetheless privilege men and male concerns. If I had to speculate, I would say that Rooney set out to create convincing men as a more-or-less conscious effort to remedy the deficiencies of Normal People and I don't think I am imagining a parallel with Smith trying, more-or-less consciously, to use The Autograph Man to show that she can write about people notably unlike herself.)
Our Evenings does not try to describe heterosexual attraction, so I cannot make a direct comparison there, and the homosexual attractions seemed plausible to me. That said, there was also a weakness in the portrayal of a female character. David's mother, Avril, is a pretty important person in the book and yet she was also somewhat of a cipher throughout, and I found her lover, Mrs Croft, to be more convincing. Our Evenings is more directly concerned with the consciousness of one individual than Intermezzo, so perhaps a certain degree of vagueness is excusable in the other characters, observed very much from the outside (as Winn observes Annette in the excerpts above), but Avril is a little too central for this to be a complete justification.
"That's all very well, FoA," you will say, "but what should I take away from all this?" The answer, perhaps, is something about trajectories: I think Rooney is on the up, having set herself an ambitious project and, by and large, pulling it off; while Hollinghurst might be on a downward path, his mastery of the 'episode' still in place, but with a reduced ability to make a coherent whole. Or maybe the strengths and weaknesses of both are just blips - only time will tell. But at least we can enter 2026 knowing that literary fiction is still alive and kicking, and there is much to look forward to, and that is the most that can be said at the beginning of any year. Happy New Year to you all!
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