Product Description

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

July 1954. An island off the coast of Maine. Ann Grant—a 25-year-old New York career girl—is a bridesmaid at her best friend's lavish wedding. Also present is a man named Harris Arden, whom Ann has never met . . .

After three marriages and five children, Ann Lord lies in an upstairs bedroom of a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What comes to her, eclipsing a stream of doctor's visits and friends stopping by and grown children overheard whispering from the next room, is a rush of memories from a weekend 40 years ago in Maine, when she fell in love with a passion that even now throws a shadow onto the rest of her life. In Evening, Susan Minot gives us a novel of spellbinding power on the nature of memory and love.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #97874 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Released on: 2007-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
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.

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Customer Reviews

Whatever We May Think of at the End of Life
This was truly a striking story. I didn't like it much at first, but as I continued reading I saw there was something beautiful being realized. I had a good feeling after I finished reading it - I enjoyed the story and admire Susan Minot's confidence to write a novel in this way - her loose, rambling style captured the subconscious mind.

It's true that this is a sprawling story which was sometimes hard to follow but I think that often, that's the way memories get tangled up at the end of life after an illness. It gives the reader an inside view of dying, which is very thought-provoking. I'm intrigued to see the movie and to see how their treatment affects the plot and storyline.

Stunk it up
The ending in the book was very disappointing. The chapters rambled on, the character is confused by medication. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. I'm gonna try to sell it on the bulletin board at work. I'm not even putting it back on my bookshelf!

A subject for a novel and for a film
Evening is a wanderful book about the love, the time and the memory. I have seen the film and after I have read the book: there is a complete corrispondence bethween them: I suggest to read it to all interested on human feelings.
Florindo Pirone