The Evenings

Reve gives Frits nothing to do and nowhere to be for ten December evenings, and treats that emptiness with the same ceremonious attention a more eventful novel would give a wedding or a death: a rabbit bought for dinner, a friend's small cruelty, his own thinning hair, all weighed with mock-solemn gravity that makes banality itself feel like the century's real subject rather than a gap between subjects.

Images of decay and dead animals, plucked poultry, a butchered hare, his own body's small failures, recur with a patience that borders on ritual, and Frits's morbid private jokes about them are the novel's real coping mechanism: comedy as the only available response to a postwar Dutch culture demanding reconstruction-era earnestness from a young man who has nothing to reconstruct and nowhere obvious to put his dread. His obsession with his own thinning hair, revisited almost nightly, works the same way in miniature: a genuinely trivial anxiety inflated to crisis proportions precisely because it is the one form of decline small enough for him to actually name out loud.

Reve wrote this at twenty-three, and its flat, nihilistic voice scandalized a country still clinging to postwar rebuilding as a moral project; a debut this deadpan about a young man's total lack of purpose read, to many first readers, as an insult to the reconstruction itself. Decades later a national poll voted it the best Dutch novel of the century, the clearest sign that what looked like nihilism in 1947 had come to look, in retrospect, like the century's most accurate mood.

Frits's evenings with his friends Viktor and Jaap Elderman rarely amount to affection in any conventional sense, instead running on a steady traffic of needling, one-upmanship, and small manufactured cruelties the three of them seem to require from each other more than they enjoy. Reve treats that dynamic without judgment, simply the register available to young men whose culture has no other vocabulary for closeness, so that watching Frits maintain these friendships becomes its own quiet study of intimacy performed as sparring, since sincerity has no idiom his particular Amsterdam has taught him to use instead.