If you’re interested in modern beauty standards, the social value of femininity, and the fetishization of mothers in American culture, Hulu’s recent reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a rich, chaotic product. I watched the entire series in a couple of days, gasping and Googling, shriveling inwardly every time I caught a glimpse of my haggard self in the mirror compared with these lustrous, bronzed, cosmetically enhanced women. The stars of the show are young wives and mothers in Utah who have become notable in a corner of the internet called MomTok; their online side hustles include performing 20-second group dances and lip-syncing to clips from old movies, the financial success of which has helped them eclipse their husbands as earners. As an encapsulation of 21st-century womanhood, it’s almost too on the nose: a discordant jumble of feminist ideals, branded domesticity, and lip filler.

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a logical end point for lifestyle-focused reality television, which has never quite been able to decide whether women should be gyrating on a pole or devoutly raising a dozen towheaded children. This show bravely asks: Why not both? “We’re all moms; we’re all Mormons. I guess you could say a lot of us in MomTok look similar … We’re just going off based [on] what’s trending,” Mayci (28, two kids) explains in the first episode. The camera cuts to the women filming a video. “Mayci, I need you to twerk your ass off, as hard as you can,” Jen (24, two kids) shrieks. Jessi (31, two kids) comments on the volume of Jen’s cleavage, amplified by her breastfeeding garments. Each woman has waist-length, barrel-curled hair and teeth as white as Mentos; most wear jeans and a tight Lycra top. No children are in sight. What we’re watching isn’t the kind of dreamy domesticity that traditional momfluencers post on Instagram. It’s something more interesting: the conflation of “motherhood” as an identity with desirability, fertility, and sexual power.

[Read: The redemption of the bad mother]

America loves mothers more than women, an inclination the 2024 election has demonstrated in abundance. Mothers are given license to do things that other women often aren’t, like getting angry or even seeking political power, as long as it’s understood that whatever they’re doing is on someone else’s behalf. In a commencement address to a conservative Catholic college earlier this year, the Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker even advised the female graduates in his audience to forgo careers altogether and focus on supporting their husbands as homemakers. The women of MomTok, while pushing back against some of the strictures of the Mormon Church, are living out this advice to a curiously literal degree. They’re financially supporting their husbands as homemakers, thanks to social media. “Who is currently, like, the breadwinner at home?” Demi (30, one child) asks at one point. “I think all of us?” Mayci replies. This looks like progress—women making money, at home, with the flexibility to set their own schedule and pick their own projects. But underlying this portrait is a darker reality: The only women who get to succeed at this kind of “work” are the ones who look the part.

The women of MomTok aren’t tradwives, the smock-wearing, Aga stove–warmed, calf-snuggling performance artists who fascinate and perplex us on social media. The Secret Lives mothers flirt and assert their independence and critique the men who try to control them. Some got married as teenagers after unplanned pregnancies; several are divorced. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a statement ahead of the show’s release noting that “a number of recent productions depict lifestyles and practices blatantly inconsistent with the teachings of the church,” seemingly in reference to a widely publicized scandal involving one cast member that’s the least interesting part of the series.) Late in the season, Demi plans a girls’ trip to Las Vegas that includes VIP tickets to Chippendales, which prompts an alarming conflict between the more traditional Jen and her husband, Zac, whom she’s supported through college and is about to fund through medical school. Zac, despite having been given $2,500 by his wife to gamble on the trip, is furious that she’d agree—even as a joke—to see a male dance show. He threatens to take their kids and divorce her. “This type of behavior is exactly what MomTok is trying to break in our LDS faith,” Demi tells the camera. “We’re not doing this anymore.”

But even as they reject what they see as the suffocating confines of one institution for women, they’re bolstering another. The pursuit of a certain kind of highly maintained beauty for all eight women on the show seems to dominate everything else. In one episode, while getting Botox injections, several of the women gossip, semi-scandalized, about the fact that Jessi drank alcohol from a flask at Zac’s graduation party; the irony that they’re in that moment high on laughing gas administered to ease the pain of the injections seems lost on everyone. In a different episode, Jessi tells her friends that she’s getting a labiaplasty, which she refers to as “a mommy makeover,” because childbirth has changed the shape and appearance of her vulva. Plastic surgery, Mayci explains, is tacitly sanctioned by the LDS Church (though LDS leaders today caution against vanity); Salt Lake City has more plastic surgeons per resident than Los Angeles.

“We wanna make sure that we’re taking care of our bodies, and we’re always told that our body is a temple,” Mayci adds during the Botox episode. “It’s actually surprising that [the Church doesn’t] really care about plastic surgery?” The moment underscores the space for interpretive tension within a faith that discourages toxins while prizing beauty in all its forms as a reflection of morality and a source of happiness. And yet it’s hard not to read this show another way: as evidence of a specific online culture that encourages women to bear children while also requiring them to erase the visible evidence of their pregnancies. The physical toll of giving birth is covered up, made as inconspicuous as the children who have left these same marks. That these mothers be beautiful and desirable in this realm is paramount.

In one sense, this is what reality television has always wanted from women. Those who can exude sexuality from the safety of the domestic sphere have long been able to build lucrative businesses in the process. In 2022, a writer for Bustle counted 52 separate beauty lines launched by stars of the Real Housewives franchise, who leveraged their fame to sell perfumes, wigs, nail polish, “firming lotion,” and false eyelashes. But the Secret Lives stars are notable for how intricately their brands are enmeshed with fertility—not the mundane reality of day-to-day motherhood but the symbolic power of sexual eligibility and maternal authority. On Secret Lives, Mayci is seen launching Baby Mama, a line of “natal supplements” for women. No one on the show seems to question the primacy of beauty. After filming wrapped, Layla (22, two children) revealed in a podcast interview that she’s had six separate cosmetic procedures over four months. “I had kids young, and I love my babies to death, but they screwed up my body, and I wanted to feel hot again,” she said. Her co-star Demi added, “That’s just the Utah way!”

[Read: How did healing ourselves get so exhausting?]

Women who don’t accept—or can’t meet—these terms are, tellingly, less visible on the show, and thus less able to leverage their new fame. Mikayla (24, three children), a doe-eyed, strikingly beautiful woman who struggles with a chronic illness that causes skin flare-ups gets sidelined; she has no primary storylines of her own, and much less screen time than the others. This gravitation toward more visibly perfected stars stems perhaps from the aspirational ideal that momfluencers represent, as Sara Petersen writes in her 2023 book, Momfluenced. “As mothers, our everyday lives are full of gritty motherhood rawness, of children refusing to wear snow pants in blizzards, or the strain of holding back tears and curses upon stepping on another fucking Lego.” She adds, “Why would we want to spend our spare time consuming someone else’s rawness when we’re sick and tired of our own?”

The women of MomTok are enthralling because they symbolize the possibility of a mother’s desirability and influence—and of a broader sisterhood. They are, with the exception of the one stock villain, Whitney (31, two children), impossibly likable, funny and scrappy and unserious. They constantly invoke their sliver of the internet as a pillar of friendship and prosperity—as in “I really want this MomTok group to survive,” and “We need to get back to what MomTok was before all this happened.” Taylor (30, three children) says that the group built its following in the hope of changing people’s attitudes about Mormon women—and making space for them to be bolder and more outspoken than the norm. But all of the women on the show seem to have wholly absorbed the idea that to be heard as mothers in America, you first have to be seen, in high-definition, expensively augmented perfection.

In her 1991 book, The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf noted that the proliferation of sexualized images of women in music videos and television and magazines toward the end of the 20th century represented “a collective reactionary hallucination willed into being by both men and women stunned and disoriented by the rapidity with which gender relations have been transformed: a bulwark of reassurance against the flood of change.” The same dynamics have since been amplified a thousandfold on TikTok, where you have precisely one second to hook someone who’s idly scrolling. The politics of visibility are more loaded than ever. Beauty, as Wolf wrote decades ago, has fully taken over “the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage.” The lifelong project of self-maintenance used to be, for women, a distraction from recognizing the things we really need. Now it’s the most valid and laudable form of labor.

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Henry James is Alan Hollinghurst’s favorite writer, and in his native England, Hollinghurst, now 70, has over the years acquired a bit of Jamesian eminence himself. He even gets compared to the Master sometimes. That’s because of the sweep and density of his novels, which span more than a century of political and social change, and his exquisite understanding of the British class system. Readers also point to his beautiful, sonorous sentences. He’s often called the best living writer of English prose.

But Hollinghurst began as a sort of enfant terrible. In 1988, his first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, was an overnight sensation, famous for two things: its stunning prose and the frequency and frankness of its gay sex scenes. The book’s narrator, a rich and idle young aristo named Will Beckwith, is mainly interested in old buildings and in cruising—especially for well-muscled, dark-skinned men. He describes his sex life with an avidity and an exactness that are almost poetic. Here, for example, is one of his many descriptions of male genitalia:

O the difference of man and man. Sometimes in the showers, which only epitomized and confirmed a general feeling held elsewhere, I was amazed and enlightened by the variety of the male organ. In the rank and file of men showering the cocks and balls took on the air almost of an independent species, exhibited in instructive contrasts. Here was the long, listless penis, there the curt, athletic knob or innocent rosebud of someone scarcely out of school.

Before Hollinghurst, few had written about gay sexuality so graphically, not even pornographers. There was more of the same in Hollinghurst’s next book, The Folding Star (1994), whose protagonist, a failed writer named Edward Manners working as a tutor in a Bruges-like Flemish city in the late 1980s, is also an enthusiastic cruiser and appraiser of penises. Lots more followed in the novel after that, The Spell (1998), a stylish but ultimately failed attempt at a comedy of manners about four men who mostly just drink too much, do some drugs, and tumble into bed with one another.

Hollinghurst’s fourth novel, The Line of Beauty (2004), is both a satire of British politics in the Thatcher era and a lament for lost innocence, national and personal. Considered by many people to be his masterpiece, it opens in 1983, when the Tories sweep the general election, and amid the excess and excitement of that period, it also touches on something only hinted at in the earlier books: the AIDS crisis. The protagonist is a young gay man, the aptly named Nick Guest, an outsider, middle-class and provincial, who’s fascinated by wealth and privilege. He becomes a lodger at the London townhouse of an influential but corrupt Tory member of Parliament, and from that vantage educates himself simultaneously about sex, class, and politics. An amusing early scene captures the spirit: Upon losing his virginity to a young Black man he meets up with in a private garden across the street from the MP’s house, he feels “as if the trees and bushes had rolled away and all the lights of London shone in on him: little Nick Guest from Barwick, Don and Dot Guest’s boy, fucking a stranger in a Notting Hill garden at night … It was so bad, and it was so much the best thing he had ever done.” The book was bold and ambitious, and also sufficiently racy that after being awarded the Booker Prize in 2004, it briefly became tabloid fodder. “Booker Won by Gay Sex” was the weird headline in the Daily Express, while The Daily Telegraph complained that the judges had been “seduced.”

For almost two decades at that point, Hollinghurst had seemed keen to make a point with his sexual explicitness: that although homosexual behavior had been criminalized for so long in Britain, gayness was a reality there, as everywhere, and that fiction should examine all of life, including sex, from a gay perspective as closely and honestly as it has portrayed life from a heterosexual one.

[Read: Tracing the internal queer revolution]

But none of his novels (with the exception of The Spell ) is only about being gay, any more than, say, John Updike’s Rabbit books are only about being heterosexual. And after The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst may have felt that calling attention to sexual encounters, at least, had become less necessary. Since then, his novels have taken homosexuality pretty much for granted, and the sex has become comparatively scarce, and mostly not very graphic. The Sparsholt Affair (2017) even contains a funny, probably self-referential scene in which a character now in his 60s suddenly realizes that, except for his own and his husband’s, he hasn’t seen a penis in ages.

Hollinghurst’s cultural range—as his new novel, Our Evenings, again confirms—is enormous. Before he left to write full-time, he was the deputy editor of The Times Literary Supplement, and for a while he was also in charge of something called Nemo’s Almanac, a fiendishly difficult literary competition requiring contestants to identify obscure quotations from writers most people have never heard of. His novels are filled with allusions to books, poetry, music, art. Elaborate subplots in his first two also uncover a history of betrayals, political and cultural as well as personal, that are far more consequential than mere bedroom infidelities.

His formal range is unusual too. Both The Sparsholt Affair and The Stranger’s Child (2011) are narrative departures. Hollinghurst’s previous method had been something like full immersion—telling us everything, and then some. These two work by means of elision and ellipsis, unfolding in sections separated by roughly 20 years. Important events (dating back to World War I in one case, and World War II in the other) happen offstage; characters disappear and then reappear, much the way they do in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, sometimes leaving the reader uncertain at first who these people are or what, exactly, is going on. Several chapters in Sparsholt are told from the point of view of a 7-year-old girl, and they add an element of What Maisie Knew to the story. Why all the fuss over this one little drawing? she wonders—a linchpin of the plot, if only she understood. She’s not alone in her puzzlement: Both novels revolve around a cipher of sorts, each of them a war hero who casts a shadow and serves as proof of how ungraspable the past can be and how it nevertheless infiltrates the present.

The core of both books—and Hollinghurst’s abiding preoccupation—is time, and what it does to everything. Buildings fall down; reputations sink. People age, in ways that novels seldom portray anymore. It’s shocking in Stranger’s Child, for example, to see one main character, so charming as a teenager, turn into a tipsy bag lady. Most of all, time obscures the truth. Hollinghurst’s fiction is underpinned by a fierce and exacting morality that does not spare characters trying to cover up or forget the sins of the past. Which they do: People in his pages misremember their own remembering; stories change, and sometimes the important ones aren’t told at all.

Our Evenings can’t be called a sequel to The Line of Beauty—it begins much earlier, back in the ’60s, and ends much later—but it revisits many of that book’s themes and preoccupations, political ones especially. The perspective, though, is longer and more chastened. The heady Thatcher era is ancient history, and in contemporary England, where the new novel winds up, all the fizz is gone.

The outsider this time is an actor named David Win, who, just like Nick Guest, has his nose pressed against the glass of the English class system. But, a decade or so older than Guest, he encounters a more closed world. He’s half Burmese, raised by a single mother in a provincial town—“a brown-faced bastard,” in a classmate’s phrase. In The Line of Beauty (and in almost all of Hollinghurst’s books, for that matter) dark skin makes a man especially desirable, but for Win, it’s mostly just a burden, another mark of outsiderness.

As a young teenager in the mid-’60s, Win is taken up by Mark Hadlow, a wealthy, left-leaning philanthropist whom the novel presses, a little unconvincingly, into representing all that’s good about the old moneyed classes. Win even becomes a kind of surrogate son, replacing Hadlow’s real offspring, a bully and a cheat who drifts ever rightward politically, eventually helping bring about Brexit. The publicity material for the novel promises an escalating rivalry between Win and Giles Hadlow, culminating in a “shock of violence,” but that’s not really what happens. Giles pops up periodically in Win’s life, usually as an annoyance, sometimes a comic one. The real damage Giles does is to the nation, not to his father’s protégé.

Told almost entirely in the first person by Win, Our Evenings for much of its nearly 500 pages is an old-fashioned coming-of-age story, lingering, in Hollinghurst’s impeccable prose, at all the traditional stops: seaside holidays, public school, Oxford exams, punting on the Cherwell, the first stirrings of gay sexual desire, an unrequited crush on a straight classmate. Win takes forever to emerge from the closet: flirtations, mixed signals, invitations never followed up on. The book is more than half over before Win finally goes to bed with someone—and he’s nothing like Nick Guest’s hunk, just a mousy civil servant.

Win and his mother, Avril—the best character in the book—broach sex and relationships the way English parents and children used to: practically never. When Avril moves in with a woman, resorting for a while to the pretense of separate bedrooms, this upheaval in their lives is barely mentioned. As for her life with Win’s father, she’s evasive, and Win seems determined to stay ignorant. At times, in fact, Our Evenings reads like a throwback, a novel from the pre-Hollinghurst era—as if the author, now older and wiser, were reminding both himself and his readers that sexual honesty is rarely won easily, and that true emotional intimacy is often elusive.

The book also has a complicated, somewhat rueful take on race. From the beginning, Win’s acting career is compromised by his brownness. An early adviser suggests that the teenage Win should just stick to radio. His subsequent apprenticeship is described in some detail, especially a funny stint in an experimental-theater troupe that specializes in mostly nude performances of the classics. By then—in the 1970s—there’s a suggestion that, in progressive circles at least, Win’s real handicap might be that he’s not dark enough: A Black member of the troupe quickly becomes a star in London and then in Hollywood. Mostly Win’s acting serves to supply the novel with a ready-made set of themes and imagery. As soon becomes obvious, lots of things in these pages take place just for show; hypocrisy reigns, and in one way or another, almost everyone is playing a part. Except for Win: Despite his profession, he, unlike Giles Hadlow, say—or his forerunner, Nick Guest—doesn’t fake a thing.

The title, Our Evenings, refers partly to a haunting piano piece by Leoš Janáček that Win hears during his schoolboy days, and partly to the companionable and unexpected late-life relationship he discovers with the Dickensian-named Richard Roughsedge. But the pronoun could also apply to England as a whole, whose twilit hours, the book suggests, are not as sexy as the old days and still not very advanced when it comes to prejudice against the “wogs.” As is so often true of Hollinghurst’s work, an autumnal element runs through the book, a Housman-like sense of belatedness, of better times gone by. The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, that warhorse of English traditionalism, is mentioned six times, and his plangent music—invoking a lost, idyllic England; a greener, more pleasant land—could easily be the novel’s soundtrack.

Our Evenings is not Hollinghurst’s strongest book, but it may be his saddest, with its sense of what James called “muddlement” and of lives never quite fulfilled. Win’s mother is lonely and misunderstood throughout. Win himself has trouble making lasting connections, and his career, though it eventually earns him some small renown, is not all it could or should have been. Almost as if wearying of itself, the novel doesn’t so much end as just come to a stop, seemingly overwhelmed by the mess that contemporary Britain has become. Brexit, COVID, bloodshed in the streets—even Thatcher’s England was happier than this. By the final pages, you may find yourself wondering whether Hollinghurst’s sense of loss might extend to his own exhilarating early days, when in writing about gay life there were still boundaries to be broken.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “Alan Hollinghurst’s Lost England.” ​​​​