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Evening (Vintage Contemporaries) |  |
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Evening (Vintage Contemporaries) | |
Something stole into her as she walked in the dark, a dream she'd had long ago. The air was so black she was unable to see her arms, it was a warm summer night. Above her she could make out the dark line of the tops of spruce trees and a sky lit with stars. She felt the warm tar through the soles of her shoes. The boy beside her took her hand.In the porous world between conscious and unconscious the protagonist of Evening revisits the great passions of her life, along with its considerable disappointments. The boy in the dark remains the fixed point--not so much because he is the most important man in her life, but because of the untapped possibilities he represents. Meanwhile, friends and relations come to sit by Ann Lord's side as she veers between clarity and feverish recollection.
In her third novel, Susan Minot takes some new risks--her narrative spanning seven decades of memory and her style ranging from Stegneresque particularity to the exquisite abstraction Virginia Woolf perfected in To the Lighthouse. Equal parts memory and desire, fiction and poetry, Evening is a seductive story made more so by the measured pace of details emerging, one by one, like stars. --Cristina Del Sesto --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
A dying woman's abiding passion for a lover she met in her 20s propels this eloquent third novel by the gifted author of Monkeys and Folly. As 65-year-old cancer patient Ann Grant Lord drifts in and out of a morphine-induced haze, her recollections range back and forth between 1954 and 1994, mulling over the influences that have shaped her life. In particular, she clings to the memory of Harris Arden, the young doctor she met at the wedding of her best friend, Lila Wittenborn, and their brief affair, which he ended to marry another. Resigned to a life without bliss, Ann subsequently sang in cabarets and accumulated husbands, survived motherhood, widowhood and the death of her 12-year-old son but never knew another passion like the one she felt for Harris. With insight and sensitivity, Minot sketches the small daily travails of the deathbed vigils shared by Ann's friends and step-siblings and keeps tension high by skillfully foreshadowing (or back-shadowing) certain of the novel's largest, saddest events, all the while withholding longed-for particulars. The day after the wedding, we eventually learn, the Wittenborns suffered a crushing loss. The juxtaposition of Ann's heartbreak with the more universal tragedy that affected her friend's family accentuates the novel's achingly poignant climax. As the end nears, Ann's drug-induced hallucinations, memories and imagined conversations with Harris all merge into one roiling stream in which Minot's flair for dramatization comes to the fore, rendering her heroine's experience of love at first sight plausible and enviable. Minot has created in Ann a woman whose ardent past allows her to face death while savoring the exhilaration that marked her full and passionate life. Editor, Jordan Pavlin; agent, Georges Borchardt; Random House audio.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Ann Lord is facing the evening of her life as she lies dying of cancer in an upstairs room. Visited daily by her adult children and old friends, attended around the clock by professionals, she is aware of them only sporadically?she is reliving a weekend more than four decades past, during her 25th summer. As a bridesmaid at a New England wedding, Ann experienced love, passion, loss, and tragedy so intense that the rest of her privileged, eventful life was anticlimactic. As Ann slips in and out of the past, her memories and reflections are crafted with elegant stylistic flair, but the action, occurring mostly in her mind, can be slow going, even when the plot strays toward soap opera. The dry patches are relieved too infrequently by tantalizing glimpses of the interaction among Ann's caregivers. Nevertheless, as with Minot's novel Folly (LJ 2/1/93), this book offers rewards for serious readers. Buy where the author is in demand.
-?Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Minot is renowned for the exquisite precision of her language and her emotional insights, traits she has elevated to new and exhilarating heights in this supremely sensual, sensitive, dramatic, and artistic novel, her finest work to date. In the present, Minot's narrator, Ann Lord, is 65 and facing certain death from cancer. It's July, she is confined to bed in her gracious Boston home, and her doctor has told her that she won't live to see the leaves change. Inebriated with pain and morphine, Ann drifts from memory to reverie to dream as her children from three marriages take turns sitting with her and conferring nervously downstairs, as Nurse Brown tends gently to her contracting body, as comforting sounds and smells drift in through open windows, and as the ceiling appears to her as a blank page on which to write her life. And what does she remember most clearly? Not her husbands, although we do get glimpses of them, and not her children's childhoods, but a summer weekend 40 years ago when she attended a close friend's elaborate wedding on a Maine island and found and lost the one true love of her life. The instant she met Harris Arden, every cell in her body went wild with a fever as overwhelming in its own way as the delirium that seizes her now. And so she tells herself the story in minute detail, recounting every stirring sea breeze, every bracing wave, every star and glint in Harris' eyes, every commanding touch of his hands, lips, limbs. It was a weekend of revelation and tragedy, and its lessons burn bright in Ann's wavering consciousness. Minot's renderings of the heat of the past and the cooling of the present are gorgeously cinematic, so rich in color and motion, music and atmosphere that sorrow and death become no less glorious than joy and life. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
Minot (Folly, 1992, etc.) aims high in taking a long look at the beginning and end of a love-lifein a project thats not without its gripping moments but that requires an excess of artifice to stay aloft and doesnt steadily convince. Ann Lord, 65, is dying of cancer, attended by a nurse and her various adult offspring from three not-so-happy marriages. In matters of love, Anns entire life, it seems, has been in one way or another less than blissfulthough all might have been otherwise if things had been slightly different back in 1954when Ann was 25during a gala seaside weekend celebrating a friends marriage. Those were the three days when Ann met (The persons face seemed lit from within), loved (The great thing was happening to her),and lost (to another, by a cruel twist of fate) the ultra-handsome doctor and Korea vet whom she (though not necessarily the reader) fell in love with at first sight(His tall legs kept coming toward her). Minots decision to pin the whole weight of the novel on one weekend causes much strain, and her best successes come when she drops romance altogether and lets her character( la Mrs. Ramsay) meditate on loss and the passing of time (. . . they would last and not she . . . .The things in the house were not herself). Elsewhere, though, the burden of making the 40-year-ago weekend (the highest point in ones life) significant enough for the book to work tempts the author back into her familiar Hemingway-style filler-mode (Ann had had feelings with a few other boys and with each there was something particular . . . which was unique and it seemed that the. . . feeling around Harris Arden was more unique than usual) or into topping the story with a sensational event to try to up the psychological ante. As always with Minot, moments of incisive and telling beauty, mood, and atmosphere, but also, in this case, much thats much less. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
In spare and lovely language, Susan Minot has set forth a real life, in all its particularity and splendor and pain. This is the task of the novelist, and in "Evening" Minot has succeeded admirably. -- The New York Times Book Review, Roxana Robinson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"Stunning . . . a powerful story."
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Exquisite . . . a beautifully realized work." —The Boston Globe
