Kamala Harris’s fate in the remaining weeks of the presidential campaign may turn on whether she can shift the attention of enough voters back to what they might fear from a potential second White House term for Donald Trump.

Since replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee this summer, Harris has focused her campaign message above all on reassuring voters that she has the experience and values to serve in the Oval Office. But a consensus is growing among Democratic political professionals that Harris is failing to deliver a sufficiently urgent warning about the risk Trump could pose to American society and democracy in another presidential term.

“Reassurance ain’t gonna be what wins the race,” the Democratic pollster Paul Maslin told me—an assessment almost universally shared among the wide array of Democratic strategists and operatives I’ve spoken with in recent days. “What wins the race is the line from the convention: We ain’t going back. We aren’t going to live with this insanity again. It has to be more personal, on him: The man presents risks that this country cannot afford to take.”

Harris aides insist that she and the campaign have never lost sight of the need to keep making voters aware of the dangers inherent in her opponent’s agenda. But she appears now to be recalibrating the balance in her messaging between reassurance and risk.

At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Monday night, Harris had a video clip play of some of Trump’s most extreme declarations—including his insistence in a Fox interview on Sunday that he would use the National Guard or the U.S. military against what he called “the enemy from within.” Then, in stark language, she warned: “Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged, and he is out for unchecked power.” In her combative interview on Fox News last night, Harris again expressed outrage about Trump’s indication that he would use the military against “the enemy from within,” accurately pushing back against Bret Baier and the network for sanitizing a clip of Trump’s reaffirmation of that threat at a Fox town-hall broadcast earlier in the day.

Many Democratic strategists believe that the party has performed best in the Trump era when it has successfully kept the voters in its coalition focused on the risks he presents to their rights and values—and his latest threat to use the military against protesters is exactly one such risk to them. Using data from the Democratic targeting firm Catalist, the Democratic strategist Michael Podhorzer has calculated that about 91 million different people have come out in the four elections since 2016 to vote against Trump or Republicans, considerably more than the 83 million who have come out to vote for him or GOP candidates. To Podhorzer, the vital question as Election Day looms is whether the infrequent voters in this “anti-MAGA majority” will feel enough sense of urgency to turn out again.

“The reason [the race] is as close as it is right now is because there’s just not enough alarm in the electorate about a second Trump term,” Podhorzer, who was formerly the political director of the AFL-CIO, told me, “and that’s what is most alarming to me.”

Harris is pivoting toward a sharper message about Trump at a moment when his campaign appears to have seized the initiative in the battleground states with his withering and unrelenting attacks on her. National polls remain mostly encouraging for Harris; several of them showed a slight tick upward in her support this week. But Republicans believe that after a weeks-long barrage of ads portraying Harris as weak on crime and immigration and extreme on transgender rights, swing voters in these decisive states are inclined to see her, rather than Trump, as the greater risk in the White House.

Although Harris is describing Trump as “unstable,” Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for his campaign, says that at this point more voters see him, over her, as a potential source of stability amid concerns that inflation, crime, the southern border, and international relations have at times seemed out of control under Biden. “They think [Trump] is the one who will give us that peace and prosperity they look for in a president,” McLaughlin told me. “They want somebody who is going to take charge and solve their problems, and that’s what Donald Trump is really good at.”

Democrats are not worried that large numbers of voters outside Trump’s base will ever see him as a source of stability. But they acknowledge that the Republican ad fusillade—particularly the messages about Harris’s support, during her 2019 presidential campaign, for gender-conforming surgery for prisoners—has caused some swing-state voters to focus more on their worries about her (that she’s too liberal or inexperienced) than their fears about Trump (that he’s too erratic, belligerent, or threatening to the rule of law).

The clearest measure that voters’ concerns about a second Trump presidency are receding may be their improving assessments of his first term. A Wall Street Journal poll conducted by a bipartisan polling team and released late last week found that Trump’s retrospective job-approval rating had reached 50 percent or higher in six of the seven battleground states, and stood at 48 percent in the seventh, Arizona.

An NBC poll released on Sunday, which was conducted by another bipartisan polling team, found that 48 percent of voters nationwide now retrospectively approve of Trump’s performance as president; that rating was higher than the same survey ever recorded for Trump while he was in office. A Marquette Law School national poll released yesterday similarly showed his retrospective job approval reaching 50 percent. (Trump was famously the only president in the history of Gallup polling whose approval rating never reached 50 percent during his tenure.)

Views about Trump’s first term are improving, pollsters in both parties say, because voters are mostly measuring him against what they like least about Biden’s presidency, primarily inflation and years of disorder on the southern border (though it has notably calmed in recent months). “Trump’s retrospective job rating is higher because of the contrast with Biden,” Bill McInturff, a longtime Republican pollster who worked on the NBC survey, told me. “Majorities say the Biden administration has been a failure. A plurality say Biden’s policies hurt them and their families, while Trump’s policies helped them.”

Harris could still win despite voters becoming more bullish about Trump’s first term, but it won’t be easy: The NBC poll found that, in every major demographic group, the share of voters supporting Trump against Harris almost exactly equals the share that now approves of his performance as president.

Because of the unusual circumstances in which Harris secured her party’s nomination, voters probably knew less about her at that advanced stage in the presidential campaign season than they did about any major-party nominee since Republicans plucked the little-known business executive Wendell Willkie to run against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Few political professionals dispute that her late entry required her campaign to devote much of its initial effort to introducing her to voters.

In her speeches, media appearances, and advertising, Harris has placed most emphasis on convincing voters that she is qualified to serve as president, tough enough on crime and the border to keep them safe, committed to supporting the middle class because she comes from it, and determined to govern in a centrist, bipartisan fashion. This sustained effort has yielded important political dividends for her in a very short period. Polls have consistently showed that the share of Americans with a favorable view of her has significantly increased since she replaced Biden as the nominee. Harris has gained on other important personal measures as well. A recent national Gallup poll found that she has drawn level with Trump on the qualities of displaying good judgment in a crisis and managing the government effectively. Gallup also found that she has outstripped him on moral character, honesty, likability, and caring about voters’ needs.

The question more Democrats are asking is whether Harris has squeezed as much advantage as she can out of this positive messaging about her own qualifications. That question seemed especially acute after she raced through a swarm of media interviews earlier this month, appearing on podcasts aimed at young women and Black men, as well as on The View, 60 Minutes, CBS’s The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and a Univision town hall.

Across those interviews, Harris seemed determined to establish her personal “relatability,” demonstrating to voters, especially women, that she had lived through experiences similar to their own and understood what it would take to improve their lives. But she offered no sense of heightened alarm about what a second Trump term could mean for each of the constituencies that her appearances targeted.

One Democratic strategist, who is closely watching the campaign’s deliberations and requested anonymity to speak freely, worries that Harris has not been airing a direct response to Trump’s brutal ad attacking her position on transgender rights, or pressing the case against him aggressively enough on what a second Trump term might mean. “We’ve been trying to fight this negative onslaught with these positive ads,” this strategist told me. “We’re bringing the proverbial squirt gun to the firefight here in terms of how we are dealing with the most vicious negative ad campaign in presidential history.”

Harris’s emphasis on reassurance has also shaped how she’s approached the policy debate with Trump. Her determination to display toughness on the border has, as I’ve written, discouraged her from challenging Trump on arguably the most extreme proposal of his entire campaign: his plan for the mass deportation of an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Likewise, her determination to stress her tough-on-crime credentials has apparently discouraged her from challenging another of Trump’s most draconian plans: his pledge to require every U.S. police department to implement so-called stop-and-frisk policies as a condition of receiving federal law-enforcement aid. In New York City, that policy was eventually declared unconstitutional because it resulted in police stopping many young Black and Latino men without cause. Yet, for weeks, Harris never mentioned Trump’s proposal, even in appearances aimed at Black audiences.

“For low-propensity Black voters, Donald Trump’s just atrocious policy proposals for the civil rights agenda and policing is one of the main motivators that moves them toward the Democrats,” Alvin Tillery, a Northwestern University professor who founded a PAC targeting Black swing voters, told me. “Forget Bidenomics, forget all the kind of race-neutral things she is trotting out today. Mentoring for Black men? Really? That is not going to move a 21-year-old guy that works at Target who is thinking about staying home or voting for her to get off the couch.” Tillery’s PAC, the Alliance for Black Equality, is running digital ads showing young Black men and women lamenting the impact that stop-and-frisk could have on them, but he’s operating on a shoestring budget.

More broadly, some Democrats worry that Harris’s priority on attracting Republican-leaning voters cool to Trump has somewhat dulled her messages about the threat posed by the Trump-era GOP. Harris has repeatedly offered outreach and reassurance to GOP-leaning voters, by promising, for example, to put a Republican in her Cabinet and establish a policy advisory council that will include Republicans. (She held another rally in the Philadelphia suburbs yesterday to tout her Republican support.) That could help her win more of the Nikki Haley–type suburban moderates—but at the price of diluting the sense of threat necessary to motivate irregular anti-Trump voters to turn out.

“I do think some sacrifices have been made in the spirit of trying to win over a certain segment of voter, who is a Republican,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a senior vice president at Way to Win, a group that provides funding for candidates and organizations focused on mobilizing minority voters, told me.

The Republican pollster Greg Strimple told me that last month’s presidential debate hurt Trump so much not only because Harris was strong, but also because his scattered and belligerent performance reminded voters of everything they didn’t like about him in office. “Now it feels to me like her momentum is gone, and Trump is steadily advancing, almost like the Russian army, in the center of the electorate,” Strimple told me. “I don’t know how she can muster enough throw weight behind her message in order to change that dynamic right now.”

Even among the most anxious Democrats I spoke with, hardly anyone believes that Harris’s situation is so dire or settled. They were widely confident that she possesses a superior get-out-the-vote operation that can lift her at the margin in the pivotal battlegrounds, particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Still, Harris this week seemed to acknowledge that she needs to sharpen her message about Trump. In an interview with the radio host Roland Martin, she forcefully denounced Trump’s long record of bigoted behavior. With Charlamagne tha God, Harris came out of the gate criticizing Trump’s stop-and-frisk mandate more forcefully than I’ve heard before, and condemning the former president for, as Bob Woodward reported in a new book, sending COVID-19 test kits to Vladimir Putin “when Black people were dying every day by the hundreds during that time.” Later, she agreed with the host when he described Trump’s language and behavior as fascist, a line she had not previously crossed.

Harris’s campaign also rolled out a new ad that also highlighted his comments about deploying the military against the “enemy from within,” and featured Olivia Troye, an aide in his administration, speaking on camera about how he’d discussed shooting American citizens participating in protests when he was president.

McLaughlin, the Trump pollster, says a big obstacle for Democrats trying to stoke fears of returning him to the White House is that voters have such an immediate point of comparison between their economic experiences in his tenure and Biden’s. Democrats “can try” to present another Trump term as too risky, but to voters, “what is it going to mean?” McLaughlin said. “I’m going to be able to afford a house because, instead of 8 percent mortgage rates, I’m going to have less than 3 percent? I’m going to have a secure border?”

Like many Democratic strategists, Fernandez Ancona believes that enough voters can be persuaded to look beyond their memories of cheaper groceries and gas to reject all the other implications of another Trump presidency. That dynamic, she points out, isn’t theoretical: It’s exactly what happened in 2022, when Democrats ran unexpectedly well, especially in the swing states, despite widespread economic dissatisfaction.

“If the question in 2022 was: Do you like the Biden administration and the state of the economy? We lose,” she told me. “But that wasn’t the question people were responding to. They were responding to: Your freedoms are at stake, do you want to protect your freedoms or do you want them taken away?”

Democratic voters are understandably dumbfounded that Trump could remain this competitive after the January 6 insurrection; his felony indictments and convictions; the civil judgments against him for sexual abuse and financial fraud; the strange lapses in memory, desultory tangents, and episodes of confusion at rallies; and his embrace of more openly racist, xenophobic, and authoritarian language. Yet nearly as remarkable may be that Harris is this competitive when so many more voters consistently say in polls that they were helped more by the policies of the Trump administration than those of the Biden administration in which she has served.

The definitive question in the final stretch of this painfully close campaign may be which of those offsetting vulnerabilities looms larger for the final few voters deciding between Harris and Trump or deciding whether to vote at all. Nothing may be more important for Harris in the remaining days than convincing voters who are disappointed with the past four years of Biden’s tenure that returning Trump to power poses risks the country should not take. As a former prosecutor, Harris more than most candidates should understand the importance of a compelling closing argument.

To watch baseball or any other sport is to confront the fundamental unpredictability of the universe, its utter refusal to bend to your wishes, no matter how fervent. In recent years, some broadcasters have sought to soothe this existential uncertainty with statistics. This season, ESPN announced that a special graphic would appear on all of its Major League Baseball telecasts. In the upper-left corner of the screen, just above the score, each team’s chance of winning the game is expressed as a percentage—a whole number, reassuring in its roundness, that is recalculated after every at-bat. Its predictions may help tame the wild and fearful id of your fandom, restricting your imagination of what might happen next to a narrow and respectable range.

You might think that so insistently reminding fans of their team’s “Win Probability” would be against ESPN’s interests. If your team is down by several runs in the eighth inning, your hopes will already be fading. But to see that sinking feeling represented on the screen, in a crisp and precise-sounding 4 percent, could make an early bedtime more enticing. The producers of reality shows such as The Amazing Race know this, which is why they use quick cuts and split screens to deceive fans into thinking that teams are closer than they really are, and that the outcome is less certain than it really is. But ESPN has a more evolved consumer in mind. We got a clue as to who this person might be in March, when Phil Orlins, a vice president of production at the company, previewed the graphic. Orlins said that Win Probability would speak “to the way people think about sports right now,” especially people “who have a wager on the game.”

Sports fandom has always had a quantitative component, but it has become much more pronounced in recent decades. As fans age, they tend to spend less of their time playing the games that they watch. They may have once mimicked a favorite player’s distinctive swing, or donned a glove and imagined themselves making a series-clinching catch. But having now left the playground behind, they don’t identify so naturally with players. They find it easier to cast themselves as coaches and general managers—numerate strategic thinkers surrounded by stacks of Excel printouts. Fantasy leagues were a gateway drug for people who liked their sports with a heavy dose of statistical analysis. Sports-gambling apps have become their heroin.

As sports gambling caught on, probability statistics started popping up everywhere in broadcasts. Apple TV+ has a whole dashboard that sometimes tells you how likely it is that each at-bat will end in a certain way. Similar graphics materialize whenever NFL coaches mull a two-point conversion. These metrics don’t appear to be very popular among casual viewers, though. Judging by enraged fan posts on X, people seem to find them either irritatingly redundant or irritatingly inaccurate. But the graphics have generated a new kind of postgame meme: When teams achieve an unlikely comeback victory, people who might have previously taken to social media to share a highlight of a late-inning home run may now share a simple plot that shows the exact moment when their team’s Win Probability swung from a low number to a high one. Last Saturday, Reed Garrett, a relief pitcher for the New York Mets, tipped his cap to this practice after the Mets’ eighth-inning rally against the Philadelphia Phillies. “Our win-probability charts are going viral right now,” he said.

Apart from this niche-use case, it’s not clear whether these statistics are even helpful for the people who watch games with the FanDuel app open. When I called up Michael Titelbaum, a philosopher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who works on probability, he told me that these statistics are easy to misinterpret. “Decades of cognitive-science experiments tell us that people are really, really bad at making sense of probability percentages,” he said. Even doctors and other professionals who often deal in such numbers regularly make faulty judgments about them. Evidence shows that most gamblers have a hard time converting probability percentages into betting odds, and that they’re especially bad at reasoning about several such percentages in combination, when making parlay bets.

Still, whatever its downsides, the spread of probabilities through culture and entertainment may be having some positive effect on people’s statistical literacy. Kenny Easwaran, a philosopher at UC Irvine, compared it to the way the concept of temperature came to be appreciated by the public. In the mid-18th century, some scientists were skeptical that there would ever be a way to represent all the varied phenomena of hot and cold—a pan’s searing surface, a steamy jungle, the chill of a glacier—with a single number. But then the thermometer became pervasive, and, with practice, people learned to correlate its readings with certain experiences. A similar transition is now under way, he told me, as probability percentages have seeped into mass culture, in weather forecasts, medical prognoses, and election coverage.

But the Win Probabilities that ESPN puts on baseball broadcasts may not be much help, because they are generated by a secret proprietary model. ESPN’s formula is not a total black box. The company has suggested that it calculates the live, in-game probability from the same kinds of data streams that other such models use. These surely include the outcomes of many previous games that had identical scores, innings, and runners on base, but the company hasn’t shared what all is factored in. Is team strength taken into account? What about specific home-field advantages, such as stadiums with unusual dimensions, and extra-raucous crowds? Any fan can make their own ongoing judgments of the odds, based on all the games they’ve seen before and what they personally know about their team. They may have watched a player tweak his back in an earlier inning, or they may remember that a certain pinch hitter has had unusual success against the other team’s closer. Surely ESPN’s model isn’t operating at this level. But without knowing its specifics, one can’t really make sense of the percentage that it generates. It’s like looking at an election forecast the week after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate without knowing whether it reflects fresh polling.

Plenty of viewers would prefer to rawdog games without predictive statistics. After all, anyone who is invested in a game will already be absorbed—to the point of madness, even—in the task of trying to intuit their team’s likelihood of victory. Easwaran told me that people are actually pretty good at this in the absence of numbers. He compared it to the organic way we use our reflexes. “If you throw a ball to me, I will probably catch it,” he said. “But if you tell me that it’s going to come at me at 15 miles per hour, at an angle of 60 degrees, from this particular direction, and ask me to calculate where I should place my hand, I am going to be really bad at that.” If you’re closely watching a baseball game, then you’ll have registered the score, the inning, and the number of people on base, and reflected them in your general level of anxiety. At best, the Win Probability graphic provides a crude quantification of what you’re already feeling. At worst, it gaslights you into second-guessing your sense of the game.

That’s not to say that sports broadcasts shouldn’t have Win Probability calculators at all, only that the best ones tend to be humans who can explain their reasoning. Chick Hearn, the longtime play-by-play announcer for the Los Angeles Lakers, used to do a version of this in the closing minutes of every Lakers win. He would try to guess the moment when the team put away their opponents for good. “This game’s in the refrigerator,” Hearn would say, when he felt the game was out of reach, and then he would continue with a refrain that every Laker fan of a certain age can recite: “The door is closed, the lights are out, the eggs are cooling, the butter’s getting hard, and the Jell-O is jigglin’.” Over the years, his refrigerator call proved highly accurate. But occasionally, he was wrong, because no matter how good your internal model, teams sometimes come back against long odds. That’s why we watch the games.

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.” ​​​​