Book review: “Evenings and Weekends” by Oisín McKenna

Most of the film takes place over three days, opening on a Friday in the summer of 2019. Mobility has been hampered by more than a decade of stagnant wages and, more literally, a heatwave. “People move slowly, if they move at all,” says an omniscient narrator who tends to lay it on thick, “and all month no one has thought a coherent thought.” Phil, a wistful young gay man who clings to the idea of ​​the city as a horizon, lives for the weekend; the narrator intones, “Then, only then, will his real life begin.” He is perhaps what Henry James once described as a “real London lover,” who sees himself as “a particle in such an incomparable assemblage.” In a text message to his girlfriend Maggie—a local Lana del Rey who vacillates between authenticity and irony to the delight of excited gays—Phil proclaims: “all I want is a Corbyn government and a huge ass!!“The first wish refers to Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing Labour leader, whose impending resignation would mean a shift of the party to the centre; the second is one of several allusions in the novel to the physical insecurity of young men.

The characters swim, smoke, text, sing karaoke and buy drugs and groceries. Each must deliver a revelation to the other, including more than one matter of life and death. Maggie has not yet told Phil that she is pregnant and is returning to the boring town they left behind, while he considers exposing her partner Ed’s past flings with homosexuality and homophobic bullying. Phil’s mother arrives to tell him a disastrous diagnosis. And Phil finds it hard to admit to himself that he is in love with his polyamorous roommate Kyle. On Saturday there will be a rave party in the converted warehouse where the two live precariously. It’s a well-constructed plot – everyone is urgently on their way somewhere and guaranteed to end up somewhere else – with the inherent challenge of evoking real, unadulterated life from the tight structure.

From the first sentence, the novel brims with conceit. A whale stranded in the Thames embodies the climate crisis, reflecting human uncertainty about how exactly we got to where we are now. The whale—along with Valerie, a telegenic marine biologist who resembles Princess Diana (hence her nickname Diana, Princess of Whales)—has become a national fixation. Whether the beached whale is apt as a metaphor is debatable, which in itself has a certain resonance: Britain feels particularly isolated when everyone is expected to gather at the water cooler armed with their opinions. Some characters are fascinated by the clay beneath London, or by insects thriving beneath a backyard. But McKenna never digs for the meaning of what lies beneath. Instead, he has Phil obsessively perfect a short epigraph about how the clay is one of the many “deep” things Kyle has taught him. As Phil tinkers with the wording many pages later, it is clear that this is a novel of surfaces that threatens to explode or collapse.

McKenna’s prose style is difficult to describe. He writes with comfortable unpretentiousness about office farts and helpless fathers. The explanatory tone alternates between old-fashioned lyricism – he presents the town as Dylan Thomas resonates village life – and functional sentences that could have come from a TV episode: “Holly, in her room, waits for Callum’s answer.” Then he gets cheeky. “The thing about Valerie is that she has a relationship with the whale,” he writes, in a line that shows the influence of Eileen Myles, who gives the novel its motto. Myles once wrote, “The thing is, I don’t want to go out or in tonight.” If part of McKenna wants to chase that spartan, oddly profound pulse, he mostly keeps it in check so it doesn’t get wayward.

Perhaps it is precisely in this shift between stylistic registers, underlined by a shifting politeness, that McKenna finds his authenticity. The characters constantly move on the boundaries of outsider existence, depending on who they are talking to or the social status of the supermarket they are in. Phil’s mother, Rosaleen, immigrated to England from Ireland, like the author himself (which opens up a thematic inversion of Philip Larkin’s maxim that in England “nowhere else guarantees my existence”). The book lives from its awkward encounters and inner ambiguities. Take gender. “Malehood feels like a disguise for Phil: he lets his beard grow and feels like a kind of drag king.” Ed, the father-to-be who works as a bike courier, tends to feel so detached from his gender that he wonders if he would prefer to disappear altogether. The characters are conflicted about non-monogamy and reproduction, and worry that their semi-normative desires are incompatible with the radicalism of queer theory.

And then there’s the money. The novel recalls the “kitchen sink realism” of mid-century British working-class literature, such as Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. In this tradition, McKenna depicts private lives dominated by wage labor. The characters have jobs, not careers, let alone down payments on properties. Phil describes his mother as “hardworking, hilarious, a giant of the working-class camp.” Yet she comes across as confident and eager to please. What could be read as inconsistent characterization may reflect her change in the face of mortality, but more than that, it seems to demonstrate McKenna’s intention to show how the characters struggle to get to know themselves and each other, burdened by social archetypes and uncertainty.

The writing style becomes more assured as the novel progresses, as if recreating Phil’s journey to a better understanding of himself and others. Phil is poignantly described as someone who has “an uneducated body.” Gradually, nervously, the traumas underlying his sexual inhibition come to the surface, sharpening one of the book’s sharpest edges. A crucial moment in this process occurs not in private with a single other body, but at the rave party where men are watching. McKenna writes as if stealing glances into a broken mirror, about how we grasp at our selfhood in the terrifying knowledge that others are watching.

Evenings & Weekends is an uneven but nonetheless palatable study of confusion and vulnerability. Its characters are helpless seekers who populate a novel that consists almost entirely of foreboding. It signals the arrival of a novelist sure to resonate with young people trying to form intimate relationships under the influence of quixotic politics.

Jeremy Atherton Lin is the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Gay Bar and the forthcoming Deep House.