Evening

As Ann Lord lies on her deathbed, her daughter delivers a balsam pillow from the attic. At first the ailing woman is confused, but suddenly the scent reminds her of the "wild tumult" she experienced 40 years earlier: 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 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. 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. 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 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. "Her best work yet, assured, supple, exhilarating in its nerve and cool momentum" --Joan Didion"A stunning novel...a powerful story that cuts back and forth in time to give us both the defining moment in a woman's life and an understanding of how that moment has reverberated through the remainder of her days...Her evocation of her heroine's passion for Harris Arden is so convincing, her depiction of the world she inhabits is so fiercely observed...The difference between [ Monkeys and Evening ] attests to Susan Minot's growing ambition and assurance as an artist" --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "An absorbing drama...Minot writes with quiet perceptiveness and grace, pulling thereader into Ann's deathbed reverie" -- Elle "A brilliant lyric performance" --John Casey"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 succeededadmirably" --Roxana Robinson, New York Times Book Review "It astounds in its craftsmanship and imprints itself indelibly on the heart...A haunting work of art that moves at the pace of a suspense thriller" --Sheila Bosworth, New Orleans Times-Picayune "Evening is a beautifully realized work...more mature and confident than anything she has written...An exquisite novel" --Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe"A wonderful, truthful, heartbreaking book. . .. Evening vindicates the wildest assertions any of us have made about Susan Minot's talent" --Tom McGuane"Evening is a supremely sensual, sensitive and dramatic novel...So rich in color and motion, music and atmosphere" --Donna Seaman, Booklist "I was swept up in it...It moved me and made me cry" --D. T. Max, New York Observer From the Publisher "Her best work yet, assured, supple, exhilarating in its nerve and cool momentum" --Joan Didion "A stunning novel...a powerful story that cuts back and forth in time to give us both the defining moment in a woman's life and an understanding of how that moment has reverberated through the remainder of her days...Her evocation of her heroine's passion for Harris Arden is so convincing, her depiction of the world she inhabits is so fiercely observed...The difference between [ Monkeys and Evening ] attests to Susan Minot's growing ambition and assurance as an artist" --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "An absorbing drama...Minot writes with quiet perceptiveness and grace, pulling thereader into Ann's deathbed reverie" -- Elle "A brilliant lyric performance" --John Casey "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 succeededadmirably" --Roxana Robinson, New York Times Book Review "It astounds in its craftsmanship and imprints itself indelibly on the heart...A haunting work of art that moves at the pace of a suspense thriller" --Sheila Bosworth, New Orleans Times-Picayune "Evening is a beautifully realized work...more mature and confident than anything she has written...An exquisite novel" --Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe "A wonderful, truthful, heartbreaking book. . .. Evening vindicates the wildest assertions any of us have made about Susan Minot's talent" --Tom McGuane "Evening is a supremely sensual, sensitive and dramatic novel...So rich in color and motion, music and atmosphere" --Donna Seaman, Booklist "I was swept up in it...It moved me and made me cry" --D. T. Max, New York Observer From the Inside Flap els and one short story collection published to overwhelming critical acclaim ("<i>Monkeys</i> takes your breath away," said Anne Tyler; "heartbreaking, exhilarating," raved the <i>New York Times Book Review</i>), Susan Minot has emerged as one of the most gifted writers in America, praised for her ability to strike at powerful emotional truths in language that is sensual and commanding, mesmerizing in its vitality and intelligence. Now, with Evening, she gives us her most ambitious novel, a work of surpassing beauty. During a summer weekend on the coast of Maine, at the wedding of her best friend, Ann Grant fell in love. She was twenty-five. Forty years later--after three marriages and five children--Ann Lord finds herself in the dim claustrophobia of illness, careening between lucidity and delirium and only vaguely conscious of the friends and family parading by her bedside, when the memory of that weekend returns to her with the clarity and intensity of a fever-dream Susan Minot was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Manchester-by-the-Sea. She studied writing and painting at Brown University and received an MFA in writing from Columbia University. After publishing short stories in Grand Street and The New Yorker she was offered a contract for a novel by the legendary publisher Seymour Lawrence, who was to publish her next three books. His initial support for "a work of fiction" became Monkeys , nine stories which together make up a novel about the Vincent family, a New England family of seven children with a Catholic mother and Brahmin-background father. The stories cover twelve years in the life of the children, their mother's "monkeys," during which a tragic accident alters their lives. It was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Etranger in France in l987. The novel was followed by Lust & Other Stories , a collection about wayward artists and journalists living in New York City, particularly about the relations between men and women in their twenties and thirties having difficulty coming together and difficulty breaking apart. xa0xa0xa0xa0 Her third book, Folly , set in the twenties and thirties in Boston, is a novel about a woman from a stifling Brahmin background whose choice of a husband is the determining factor in her life, and about the two different men she falls in love with. The challenge Minot set for herself was to write about a place and society which had always disturbed her and to try to imagine how a woman who was not an idiot could stay in that world. xa0xa0xa0xa0 In l994 she was contacted by the director Bernardo Bertolucci with the idea of developing his idea for a screenplay about a young American girl visiting English expatriate artists living in Tuscany and having a "sentimental education." She had always been interested in cinema as a student and moviegoer. Stealing Beauty was a collaboration with the director. It was filmed in the summer of l995, north of Siena, where she was given the opportunity to continue polishing and learning on the set. Evening is the story of a woman on her deathbed who amidst the delirium and images of her past full life relives a love affair she had forty years earlier, when at twenty-five she attended the wedding of her best friend on an island in Maine. As her children wait and tend to her, she remembers minutely the details of those three days when she met a man, a time which emerges from marriages and divorces and children as being the high point of her life. Evening has been optioned by Kennedy/Marshall at Disney, with Minot currently working on the adaptation for the screen. xa0xa0xa0xa0 Having spent too many years in one place, bent over paper writing, Minot, who has an apartment in New York City, finds herself traveling and away from home much of the time. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. A new lens passed over everything she saw, the shadows moved on the wall like skeletons handing things to each other. Her body was flung back over a thousand beds in a thousand other rooms. She was undergoing a revolution, she felt split open. In her mattress there beat the feather of a wild bird. Where were you all this time? she said. Where have you been? I guess far away. Yes you were. Too far away. They sat in silence. You know you frightened me a little, she said. At the beginning. No. You did. He smiled at that. You looked as if you didn't need anyone, she said. But those are the ones who need the most, he said. Don't you know that? I do now, she said. Too late. Never too late to know something, he said. Maybe not, she said. But too late to do any good. She lifted the yellow suitcase and banged it against her leg. She dragged it over the polished floor. The ceiling of Grand Central towered above her with arches and glass panes and squares of sunlight. She was not late and did not have to hurry. The clerk in the window bowed his forehead like a priest in confession and pushed her ticket through. Across the great domed room she spotted a redcap with a cart and though she usually would have carried her bag to save money decided this was a special occasion. She was on her way to a wedding. She signaled to him. The redcap flung her suitcase onto his cart. Whoever you're going to meet, he said, he's a lucky guy. The heat in New York had been terrible and the air underground at the gate was heavy and close. When the train came out of the tunnel she saw thunderheads turning the sky yellow and grey. The rain started, ticking the window with scratches then pouring over it in streams. Crowds of cat-o'-nine-tails surged in a wave as the train blew past. By the time they reached Providence the rain had stopped and it was hot again with a hot wind blowing in the open doors. The engine shut off and they waited in the station. No new passengers got on. It was as if the world had paused on this late morning in July. She held her book loosely and watched out the window. The station in Boston was shadowed in scaffolding dark as a cave with bands of light on the paneled benches and few travelers. The redcap who took her bag was young and did not say a word. He pushed a contraption with a bad wheel and had trouble steering through the door. She came out of the damp entranceway into the brightness of the turn-around beyond where she saw among the parked cars the dark green MG. The doors were open and she saw in front Buddy Wittenborn and in the driver's seat Ralph Eastman and a third person with his back to her. The person was standing with one foot up on the running board. When she got close Ralph caught sight of her and jumped out of the car and Buddy looked over with a lazy smile. Only when she was near did the back turn around and the long leg come off the running board and she saw the man's face. He was wearing squarish dark glasses so she couldn't see his eyes. She noticed his mouth was full though set in a particular firm way, the combination of which affected her curiously. She felt as if she'd been struck on the forehead with a brick. The person's face seemed lit from within. Ralph Eastman gave her a kiss on the cheek asking how was the career girl from New York and Buddy Wittenborn slid off the front seat and hugged her and ducked back turning his head and pushing his glasses back on his nose. He was wearing a disheveled shirt buttoned up wrong and a belt outside the belt loops and even with the beanie on his head looked as always handsome. Ralph tipped the redcap, taking charge of the bags. She was trying to look at any other place other than at the person in the sunglasses. Oh, Buddy said. This is Arden. She was far enough away from the person that not to shake his hand was not rude. She didn't dare shake his hand. Hi, she said and smiled brightly. Her handbag fell to the ground. That's Ann, Buddy said. Hello Ann. The person had a deep voice which came from somewhere deep in his chest. We've been waiting for you, Ann. It was also kind of rough. She caught a lipstick rolling and looked up. The person was not smiling. She blushed and looked back down. Am I that late? We stopped for a while in Providence . . . She felt the black glasses facing her. Ralph slammed the back hatch. A late train has been figured into the calculations. He's sure we'll miss the ferry, Buddy said. On the contrary, just what I plan to avoid. So let's go. The person was walking away from the car. He bent to pick something off the ground. Harris, Ralph called, starting the car. The person came back on long slow legs and got into the backseat beside Ann. It was an MG station wagon and the windows tilted in. He held up some keys attached to a Saint Christopher medal. These yours? he said. God, Ann said, taking her keys. Thank you. That was idiotic. She looked straight at him. Which is your name? They both are. In what order? Which is better? The face was placid and she could not read the eyes behind the glasses. I don't know. They're both good. No, the person said and he smiled for the first time. One is always better. It was 1954 and Ann Grant was twenty-five years old. They drove north. She liked being the girl in a car with three boys. They drove through Revere where the water was purple at the shore and the highway was raised above the tract houses, past gas stations with enormous signs shaped like horses, and miniature golf courses with waterfalls and orange dinosaurs. They passed motels with teepee cabins and restaurants shaped like pagodas and restaurants shaped like barns with plastic cows outside. They exited to Danvers winding past steeples and fudge stores with pink script writing back onto the highway where green countryside flickered out the window behind the person's profile. His name was Harris, Ralph was the one to say, Harris Arden. She sat beside Harris Arden in the backseat and they talked and now and then he turned toward her. He'd grown up in Virginia, was born in Turkey, had lived in Switzerland. His father was a diplomat, raised in St. Louis, his mother was Turkish which explained his coloring. Harris Arden lived in Chicago now, he said, and worked in a hospital. Then Ann Grant realized who he was. He was Doctor R, Carl's friend, whom he'd served with in Korea. But it wasn't Doctor R as she had thought but Doctor Ar for Arden. She had pictured someone older. You're the musician, she said. Not so much anymore. Isn't your band playing at the wedding? What's left of it. And you're a doctor too? Buddy said, prying open a beer with a Swiss Army knife. Who wants a cold one? No one took him up on it. The person didn't seem to hear and stared out the window. Ann sings, Ralph said, facing forward driving. Does she? The person looked interested. Just for fun, Ann said. Just in little places. In New York little places are pretty big. These really are little, she said. It's not even my job. Ann's a pretty good singer, Buddy said. I'd like to hear her sing, said the person in the sunglasses looking ahead. Have you moved her? She was sitting up this morning. Mrs. Lord. The smell of rose water. I'm sorry I'm late, said Ann Lord. We stopped for a long time in Providence. Mrs. Lord, you have a visitor. Ann Lord opened her eyes. No he's not, she said. It wasn't a visitor, it was Dr. Baker. Afternoon Ann. Mercifully Dick Baker did not shout at her. His sleeves were rolled above the elbows, a stethoscope hung around his neck. Afternoon, she said. I look a fright. Nonsense, he said. You've never looked a fright. He came in every other day. Dick Baker was a friend of the Lords' and used to come often to dinner parties when Oscar was still alive--they had entertained more then--and as he held Ann Lord's wrist he remembered once watching her leave the dining room and disappear down the dark hallway toward the kitchen. She'd been wearing a dress with a pink sheen to it and the sheen had retained the light after her legs and arms and head had disappeared in the gloom. He checked her pulse against his watch, remembering the sheen. After a while she said, Where am I? You're in Cambridge in the house on Emerson Street. His dry fingers pressed near her ears. He wasn't looking at her, feeling around the way doctors do, as if they're blind. I don't mean that, she said, fixing him in her gaze. That's not what I mean. You're doing fine. Dick. He had bent over the beds of many patients, but it was always different when you knew the person. It had an extra dimension to it. Dr. Baker was not a spiritual man. He considered himself a practical man. His job was simply to figure out what the heck the problem was and do his damndest to fix it and if he couldn't then move on and hope with the next one he could. He had been as straightforward with her as he was able. The treatment might give her some time but as far as curing this type of cancer . . . no that wasn't likely. There was no doubt about it when you knew the person the job changed. He felt less effectual when he knew more of the person's life. Not that he knew a great deal about Ann Lord. She was one of those mysterious women, not that he kne... Read more