Oisín McKenna

A Novel

Evenings and Weekends

Lindsay

That was the thing with dom tops, they thought you wanted to be treated like dirt. In many ways, Phil did want to feel owned. He wanted to feel like an object, but a cherished one, a priceless heirloom. Something that you could do whatever you wanted to, but what you wanted to do was treat it with care. He wanted to be a hole to get fucked, yes, but also he wanted to be loved. He didn't want these two desires to be mutually exclusive.

When she tries to explain it to herself, the best she can come up with is that just once she wants to be at the center of things, no longer an afterthought. No longer a peripheral figure in her own life.

Whenever he looks at art or nature with friends, he feels obliged to express feelings on it, even when he has none. And this discrepancy between feelings spoken and feelings felt gives him the sensation of not existing at all.

Frank, a few years older than Phil, has taken his fair share of walks around the polyamorous block and is now retired into relative monogamy at the age of 36. His assessment was this: everyone's in an open relationship. Everyone's fucking everyone else. Fine, no big deal. But what happens when these boys in open relationships start staying over with their casual hookups? What happens when they have coffee the next day, and go for a little walk, and share anecdotes about each others' troubled siblings and grandmothers' demented quirks? What happens when they say 'oh my god, that's my favorite album too,' or 'oh my god, my dad was the exact same kind of asshole as your dad'? What happens when the words 'I love you' get bandied about? Inevitable. The casual fuck bud wants to be treated as a boyfriend in his own right. And someone, somewhere down the line, is going to get hurt. In any case, Frank said that Phil was in the best position of all: all that yearning, sumptuous. The decadence of always being left, lolling about in bed afterwards with just too many feelings to put into words. He said you should only ever get what you want for the most extraordinarily brief window of time. The rest of your life, you should spend in the pining. 

"It's called inflation, honey," he'd said, luxuriating on a long drag of his fag. "If the object of your desire were within perpetual reach, it would be worthless. You must only ever graze it, a whiff of perfume on a busy street gone before you knew it was there, and then you look around in dismay, in ecstasy thinking, 'wait, did something just happen here?' You'll spend the rest of your days wanting that feeling back.

Phil wasn't having any of it. "You can't be suggesting I spend my life in a state of perpetual emotional edging."

"I'm suggesting," said Frank, "that desire is about lack. You're not in love with Keith, you're in love with the distance between what you want and what you can have. That's why boys like you go after boys with boyfriends."

His body and mind are usually shy, they shut down on the precipice of deep and vivid feeling. When faced with something hot, unknown, frightening, desirable, his body and mind try to reject it, no matter how much it would improve his life and love and happiness to have it. All of which to say, Phil has a problematic relationship to bottoming. 

Perfectly captures the feeling of knowing you can’t make your life perfect, you can only try, and not knowing if you’re able to settle in the good enough. Also, I’m its focus on a cast of characters, is a perfect example of how everyone sees the world through their own eyes, and even with love and understanding of another, you can only understand the world at depth through your own self. This is limiting, and why practice in empathy is so important. 

Emily McMeans

There was nothing wrong with this book. It was easy to read, the characters were alive, and I felt interested in where the story was going -- but it felt a little stale, as if the depth and 'ponderings' of each viewpoint was only allowed to go as far as the whale stuck on shore. Maybe that was the point and it wasn't trying to convey the sort of richness it seemed to hesitantly lean towards almost-promising before stepping back and only wetting its feet. 

Jessica 

I really enjoyed this. It felt like I was amongst friends and watching them live their lives, make mistakes and just do normal human stuff during a hot summer in london. Enjoyed the fact that the fictional story wound itself around the real life whale in the Thames story.

Aims

3.5⭐️

I really enjoyed this. It felt like I was amongst friends and watching them live their lives, make mistakes and just do normal human stuff during a hot summer in london. Enjoyed the fact that the fictional story wound itself around the real life whale in the Thames story.

Accidentally the perfect weekend to read this as we are experiencing a heatwave at the summer soltice on a June weekend.

I liked how well this seemed to capture both the spirit of London itself and the modern lifestyles that inhabit it. I felt like I could know those people; I felt like I could see them sitting at a pub on a summer Friday afternoon.

McKenna also keeps the pacing of the novel up very well, without feeling overly descriptive or detailed - a pitfall of many a novel set over one weekend - which helps breeze through the novel. Just like a summer weekend.

Accidentally the perfect weekend to read this as we are experiencing a heatwave at the summer soltice on a June weekend.

I liked how well this seemed to capture both the spirit of London itself and the modern lifestyles that inhabit it. I felt like I could know those people; I felt like I could see them sitting at a pub on a summer Friday afternoon.

McKenna also keeps the pacing of the novel up very well, without feeling overly descriptive or detailed - a pitfall of many a novel set over one weekend - which helps breeze through the novel. Just like a summer weekend.

so queer so beautiful :’) everything and everyone so full of life they’re bursting at the seams

petrina

interconnected relationships, how to live and love, grief and truth. In a summer bursting at the seams, the threads unspool. 

Evenings and Weekends A Novel

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