Evening

Rating:
Summary: Difficult to embrace
Review: Although Minot's style of writing takes some getting used to, it is well-suited to the morphine-induced deathbed conversations. It evokes a hazy, confused and dreamlike atmosphere. The book disappoints, however, because it is impossible to feel anything substantive towards any of the characters. Most -- particulary Ann and her lover, Arden -- come across as shallow, selfish and utterly self-absorbed. Was the real tragedy of Ann's life that she didn't get to spend it with the only man she ever "loved," or rather that she didn't truly love anyone but herself? She treated the husbands and children in her life with indifference and occasional annoyance. She only mentions in passing the death of her own son. Instead she focuses on a weekend of sex with a stranger as the high point of her life -- not marriage, not childbirth, not her families or other experiences. If that is not a life wasted, then I don't know what is! The only thing that saves this novel is the beautiful but difficult dreamlike prose, and the desire of the reader to get to the REAL tragedy or love of Ann's life, which never materializes.

Rating:
Summary: Not a love story
Review: A wonderful, haunting novel with many layers of meaning. Minot's unconventional narrative and grammatical style perfectly suit her character's journey to reconcile her life in its final hours. Do we ever understand our lives whole, and with perfect clarity? The main character's tragic fixation on one three-day weekend as the "highest moment" of her life reminds me of the following passage from Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky:

She would not really believe that he was dead, but rather that he had gone back inside himself to stay there, and that he would never be conscious of her again; so that in reality it would be she who ceased to exist, at least to a great degree. She would be the one who had entered partially into the realm of death, while he would go on, an anguish inside her, a door left unopen, a chance irretrievably lost.

Evenings explores, with great compassion, this moving and all-too-human predicament, its implications, and its ultimate consequences.

Rating:
Summary: Dull, Vacuous and Boring!
Review: Is it possible to give a book zero stars? This one would merit it. After 100 pages I was still waiting for something of interest to happen. After that I stuck with it just to say I had perserverance. Ann, 65 years old, dying of cancer,drifts through a haze of memory to the highlight of her insipid life - a weekend of love with Harris Arden one summer weekend at a friends wedding. Arden is as vacuous as Ann. I didn't care about any of the characters in this book. In fact I had trouble telling them apart, as they were all cut from the same dull mold. The author tries to be artsy with her lack of punctuation, but endless run-on sentences hardly make for a fine novel. Save you money and your eyesight and read something else instead. I was happy when this dreadful book was over.

Rating:
Summary: A truly beautiful book.
Review: I was taken in by Minot's wonderfully evocative prose from the very first word. I always dreamed of being a writer and this is how I would want to write.

Rating:
Summary: Tedious, attenuated tale based on romantic cliche
Review: Minot lumbers her way through present and past, teasing out the wedding weekend exasperatingly. I was skimming the sick room scenes, then even the scenes of the past. I kept thinking "Bridges of Madison County," except here it was three days instead of four. Plus, if you want to be lauded for aesthetic sensibilities, surely you, or your editor, ought to get some rudimentary grammar right--the right verb forms for lay and lie, using ground, rather than grinded for the past tense of ground, and a million alright misuses. It's ALL RIGHT. These pesky irritants were like mosquitoes swarming over an already unsavory bog.

Rating:
Summary: Lyrical prose, shallow characters, ultimately disappointing
Review: "Evening" was tantalizing and sensual, but ultimately disappointing. Susan Minot's lyrical style seems to capture how I would imagine the experience of dying slowly. Yet the plot and characters were too thin for the novel to take hold. The minor characters--Ann's children and her friends of 40 years ago--were cardboard and interchangeable. In fact, I felt no sorrow when Ann died, because she was shallow, caring little for her children, untouched by the experience of motherhood, and having no other accomplishments to speak of. Harris, the love of her life with nothing more than good looks to offer, seems undeserving of Ann's extraordinary deathbed passion.

Rating:
Summary: intruiging, emotional
Review: I really enjoyed 'Evening.' I was a little confused at the beginning of the book, because this is the first I've read of Minot's work. She has a way of pulling the reader in to the corners of the character's lives unlike any other author I've read. Her method of unpunctuated paragraphs is a very effective way of slipping the shoes of the character onto the reader's feet. I really experienced this book.

Rating:
Summary: Poetic, evocative women's story.
Review: I enjoy Minot's writing. The book goes very quickly with occasional necessary moments to reorient oneself. The story is a bit melodramatic but a suspenseful one. I have trouble with the fact that Ann Lord is "old." Sixty five is not old by today's standards and that was a constant bit of grating in the other- wise colloquial writing that rang quite true. The story concerns a long-ago wedding which is interspersed with the main plot of Ann's dying. A tragic event takes place and we see it done as an anatomy as we see the disintegration of Ann Lord's own anatomy. I do not see this novel as intriguing for men but I could be wrong.

Rating:
Summary: Women Who Give In and Call It Love
Review: Dying of cancer, 65-year-old Ann Grant keeps slipping out of the present into memories of a 3-day affair she had 40 years ago with Harris Arden, the only man she ever loved. This book is a very strange hybrid of old and new. Right away we notice the modern, youthful sensibility of Minot's style. Ann starts narrating in the middle of a conversation with an imaginary Harris. The unquoted dialogue draws us in close, as if readying us for intimate confessions. Ann's morphine-induced stream of consciousness reads like the best experimental language-like Joyce, like Faulkner. But behind it all, we encounter a very traditional presentation of romance. Hyper-aware of Harris's body, Ann is preoccupied with her physical attraction to him. It is pure fifties stereotype, with the camera in soft focus and heart-racing and blood-pumping descriptions. It is also the best part of the book, since Minot's forté is writing about women who've given in to passion. Harris is the aggressive Casanova, Ann is the alluring woman. Seconds after a tryst in the sail closet, Ann learns of Harris's fiance, who is arriving the next day. Indignant, Ann melts as soon as Harris confesses he's falling in love with her. She believes him, despite all the signs: he flirts with other women, he avoids her in public, and he doesn't want to tell his fiancee until he's returned to Chicago. Ann's disappointing naivete does not change with time and goes to the heart of the book's flaw. Her narrative act of remembering does not help her learn anything about herself. If Harris was the love of her life, then remembering that weekend should evoke some emotion like regret or bitterness or, at the very least, sadness at the life she'd lived without him. She might even consider her life with three unloved husbands a tragedy. But this main character does not display the emotional depth expected of a 65-year-old. She dismisses forty years of her life with unconvincing glibness, her emotions are like those of a 30-something in sheep's clothing. I wonder about the author's ability to reach beyond her years and experience to portray something she doesn't seem to have felt yet. Either that, or the author considered the narrative frame only as a vehicle to get to the past, not interested in resolution as much as remembering. Despite these flaws, the rhythm of the prose pulled me in. In the beginning, the transitions back and forth between flashbacks were disorienting and jarring, but they became seamless towards the middle of the book. The last sentence of a flashback scene would end with a detail that would echo in the so-called present, and the joy of well-written prose would take over.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written, compelling, but . . .
Review: This novel baffles me. I instinctively gave it 3 stars for craft alone; Minot writes beautifully and her ambitious, omniscient rendering of a dying older woman's thoughts is credible and compelling. She does an extraordinary job of shifting between and blending past and present, memory and action. Minot eases Death in early and brings him softly, romantically along to her inevitable final scene.

That said, I withhold two stars for the traits that hold this novel back. First, Minot has chosen to tread familiar turf-- the lives and loves of charming, drunken, clannish, wealthy New Englanders. The characters are largely as wispy and as WASPy as her Monkeys crowd. In fact, aside from Ann Grant and her one true love, Harris Arden, we are treated to a razor thin two-dimensionality. In the first 75 pages Minot introduces a bewildering array of Lilas and Margies and Buddys and Lizzies and Gigis and on and on, some dead, some alive, all dating and marrying and cavorting their vapid lives away. And though the types may be Cheeveresque, Minot's inability here to hook the reader on this overstock of characters is not. Indeed, by the time one of these boys dies two hundred pages in--in one of the novel's Central Events--I could care less.

Conversely, the blandness of these characters makes it relatively easy for Minot to build up her towering central "love" story. But *is* it a love story? Through all the minutiae of the relationship Minot dredges from Grant's mind I was struck that it is far more a story of lust than love. We are treated to a very physical description of what is essentially a weekend fling. Ann and Harris barely talk; they are too busy catching one another's eye and getting it on. Minot's lovemaking scenes are exceptionally well done, but in the end I had to wonder: Was the pain-wracked old woman merely reminiscing about the best sex she'd ever had?

And lastly, I found Ms. Minot's lack of punctuation a maddening artifice. I concede that the dispensation with quotation marks and the page-plus run-ons do create more of a dreamlike, inward dialog. But it also makes a reader work overly hard in a novel that is already timeshifting like crazy. After fording the third or fourth stream of consciousness, I found myself skipping and skimming to get on to the readable stuff. Minot tips her hat to Faulkner in a flyleaf, but has perhaps failed to recognize that Faulkner got away with lean punctutation because he was Faulkner.

And hence the bafflement: Despite my critique,I think Evening is well worth reading.