The words are a good description of a first-person narrator, that personage who at least since Jane Eyre has been a spotlight-hogging wallflower. Set in that lineage, David’s vocation is a reflection on the fiction-maker’s art generally, and Hollinghurst’s in particular. David’s life in the theater is a conduit for what is most pleasurable in Hollinghurst’s writing. All of his books have featured hyperliterate characters, along with practitioners or critics of various arts (painters, literary biographers, antiques dealers, music lovers). But these pursuits seem two-dimensional in the face of David’s craft. The hero of Our Evenings knows as much about books as his predecessors, but his profession gives him a rough-and-ready, hands-on relation to literary tradition: Racine, Shakespeare, and company are not only texts to cite or dream about but projects to get your hands on, worlds to put on, scenes to set moving. {read}