Emily, Alone: A Novel [Paperback]

Stewart O'Nan (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 27, 2011

A bittersweet tale of love and longing from the bestselling author of Last Night at the Lobster.

Once again making the ordinary and overlooked not merely visible but vital to understanding our own lives, Stewart O'Nan confirms his position as an American master with Emily, Alone. A sequel to the bestselling, much-beloved Wish You Were Here, O'Nan's intimate novel follows Emily Maxwell, a widow whose grown children have long departed. She dreams of visits from her grandchildren while mourning the turnover of her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood. When her sister-in-law and sole companion, Arlene, faints at their favorite breakfast buffet, Emily's life changes in unexpected ways. As she grapples with her new independence, she discovers a hidden strength and realizes that life always offers new possibilities.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. O'Nan checks back in with the Maxwell family from Wish You Were Here in this bracingly unsentimental, ruefully humorous, and unsparingly candid novel about the emotional and physical travails of old age. At 80, widow Emily Maxwell has become dependent on her equally aged sister-in-law, Arlene, to chauffeur them to the rounds of Pittsburgh's country club dinners, flower shows, museums, and increasingly frequent funerals. After Arlene has a stroke, Emily is forced into reclaiming her independence, but she remains clear-eyed about her diminishing future and what she can expect of her two adult children and four grandchildren, giving O'Nan the opportunity and space to expertly play out the misunderstandings, disagreements, and resentments among parents and their grown children. Emily fears saying the wrong things (yet often does) and frets about her grandchildren, who are uninterested in family traditions and lax with thank-you notes. The unhurried plot follows Emily from a lonely Thanksgiving with Arlene to a Christmas visit from her daughter and two grandchildren, Easter with her son and his children, and the eve of her summer departure to Chautauqua. During this time, friends and acquaintances die, Emily observes the deterioration of the neighborhoods she's known for decades, and she continues to converse with her old dog, Rufus. Efficient, practical, stubborn, frugal, and a lover of crosswords, church services, and baroque music, the closely observed Emily is a sort of contemporary Mrs. Bridge, and O'Nan's depiction of her attempts to sustain optimism and energy during the late stage of her life achieves a rare resonance. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Upon completion of his psychologically rigorous, emotionally raw, yet deceptively buoyant giant of a domestic drama, Wish You Were Here (2002), O�Nan obviously had sufficient material�and heart�left over to once again visit the Maxwell family of Pittsburgh a few years on in time. In the previous novel, the matriarch, Emily, has just lost her husband, and she, her sister-in-law, her two grown children, and their children gather for the last time at the family summer home in Chautauqua, New York. Now, in this sequel, we follow Emily through her domestic pleasures, concerns, and crises as the calendar year moves from holiday to holiday, with Emily experiencing increased infirmity while also seeing the physical decline of her sister-in-law and even her beloved spaniel. Connection to her children remains tricky as they approach middle age, and establishing communication with her grandchildren seems beyond her ability, for they live in a young society whose tenets are unfamiliar to her. Emily�s parental disappointment arises from her abiding sentiment that what one does for one�s children is endless and thankless. O�Nan again proves himself to be the king of detail. What people eat, how they eat it, what they think and say in the midst of eating it�this novel represents the almost minute mapping of the lay of the domestic land as O�Nan the sociological cartographer views it. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: An author tour and radio-publicity campaign will follow O�Nan�s recent appearance as a panelist at the ALA/ERT Booklist Author Forum at ALA�s Midwinter Meeting. --Brad Hooper --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (December 27, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143120492
• ISBN-13: 978-0143120490
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (96 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #76,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stewart O'Nan's award-winning fiction includes Snow Angels, A Prayer for the Dying, Last Night at the Lobster, and Emily, Alone. Granta named him one of America's Best Young Novelists. He lives in Pittsburgh.

www.stewart-onan.com

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

142 of 142 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Most Ordinary, Extraordinary Life March 20, 2011

By Jill I. Shtulman TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Stewart O'Nan may simply be genetically incapable of writing a bad book. His characters are written with precision, intelligence and detail; they're so luminously alive that a reader can accurately guess about what they're eating for dinner or what brand toothpaste they use.

In Emily, Alone, Mr. O'Nan revisits Emily, the Maxell family matriarch from a prior book, Wish You Were Here. Anyone who is seeking an action-based book or "a story arc" (as taught in college writing classes) will be sorely disappointed. But for those readers who are intrigued by a near-perfect portrait of a winningly flawed elderly woman who is still alive with anxieties, hopes, and frustrations, this is an unsparingly candid and beautifully rendered novel.

Emily Maxwell is part of a gentle but dying breed, a representative of a generation that is anchored to faith, friends and family. She mourns the civilities that are gradually going the way of the dinosaur - thank you notes, Mother's Day remembrances, and the kindness of strangers. Her two adult children have turned out imperfect - a recovering alcoholic daughter and an eager-to-please son who often acquiesces to an uncaring daughter-in-law.

With her old cadre of friends dwindling and her children caught up in their own lives, Emily fills her days with two-for-one buffet breakfasts with her sister-in-law Arlene, classical music, and her daily routine with her obstreperous dog Rufus, who is instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent life with an aging, sometimes unruly, always goofy and loving animal.

Whether she's caring for and about her Arlene, trying to keep up with family holiday traditions, keeping tabs on a house sale nearby, and trying to do the right thing in educating her children about executor's duties, Emily struggles to find purpose. She recognizes that time is not on her side any longer and reflects, "The past was the past. Better to work on the present instead of wallowing, and yet the one comforting thought was also the most infuriating. Time, which had her on the rack, would just as effortlessly rescue her. This funk was temporary. Tomorrow she would be fine."

The thing is, we all know Emily. She is our grandmother, our mother, our piano teacher, our neighbor. She is the woman who gets up each day and attends the breakfast buffet or participates in a church auction, or waits eagerly for the mail carrier or feels perplexed about preening teenagers who blast their stereo too loud. She is the one who wonders whether she should have tried a little harder with her kids, even though "she'd tried beyond the point where others might have reasonably given up." She is the one who senses that life is waning but still intends to hang on as long as possible and go for the gusto.

The fact that Stewart O'Nan can take an "invisible woman" - someone we nod to pleasantly and hope she won't engage us in conversation too long - and explore her interior and exterior life is testimony to his skill. Mr. O'Nan writes about every woman...and shows that there is no life that can be defined as ordinary.

73 of 75 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and unsentimental March 17, 2011

By switterbug TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

This is a gentle, sensitive, but unsentimental story about the marginalized lives of the elderly. Eighty-year-old Pittsburgh widow Emily Maxwell lives alone with her ripe old intractable dog, Rufus, in the modest and dignified neighborhood where she raised her children and loved her husband. She's alert, oriented, and productive in the garden, a wisp of a woman with a waning appetite and bones like balsa. She goes about her days with routine ruminations and mingled sensations. Her nights are lonely and sometimes sleepless.

You learn so much about Emily though her deliberations, her friendship with sister-in-law, Arlene, her dynamics with family, and her devotion to Rufus, who is one of the most convincing, unadulterated dogs I've met in a book. Emily's uncluttered life is centered on her aging dog, on waiting to see her children and grandchildren, (who live far away), and attending the funerals of her peers. Her faith is fastidious and her charity is steadfast. She's frugal, but not parsimonious. Of course, Emily isn't without blemishes--she has her own peculiarities and peckish ways, the details that make a fictional character authentic and memorable.

O'Nan's portrait of Emily is bald and unflinching. Many issues that affect the elderly are addressed and thoroughly examined. What happens in this story is conveyed through small gestures, in Emily's day-to-day activities, in the minutiae of her thoughts and conversations. Her transactions with the younger world around her are subtly shattering, the visible world that casts her to the sidelines and render her invisible. But Emily isn't pitiful--far from it. O'Nan's polished, unstinting prose and nuanced narrative paint a portrait of a plain and austere woman who has lived an unadorned, faithful life, a woman of her time. But beneath the wrinkles, the papery skin and the murmuring heart, there is a fragrance of youth and passion, too.

This niche book will appeal to you if the subject of aging and a protagonist who is elderly can sustain your interest. There's no fury or zeal or stormy drama inside these pages. It's an unhurried start and a gradual completion. The familiar peccadillos of ordinary people are the purr and the glue of this story. In lesser hands, it would have sagged and sputtered. However, O'Nan keeps the pace with the surest way I know--crystalline prose and consummate humanity. And a formidable dog! Highly recommended for literature lovers.

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly powerful character study March 25, 2011

By Bookreporter

Format:Hardcover

Perhaps it's hard to imagine a novel centering on an 80-year-old woman where not much happens to be compelling and even fascinating. But in the hands of Stewart O'Nan, this story is just that and more.

In EMILY, ALONE, O'Nan revisits Emily Maxwell, who was introduced in his earlier book, WISH YOU WERE HERE, and follows her through one gray Pittsburgh winter and into the spring. The pace, like Emily's own, is slow and rhythmic with an attention to detail, feeling, and the subtle changes in self and season that we so often allow to pass us by without notice or comment. With the aging but independent Emily as a guide, the life of an elderly woman is portrayed with lovely observation, thoughtful insight, and a gracefulness of language that makes this novel transcend particulars and move toward the universal.

Emily still lives in the house she shared with her husband, Henry, and where she raised her two children, Margaret and Kenneth. Now her only housemate is an aging dog named Rufus. But she spends many days with her friend and sister-in-law, Arlene, at their favorite restaurant, at church, at their country club, or at the funerals of friends and neighbors. When Arlene, who was always the driver on their excursions, has an episode that lands her in the hospital, Emily must drive for the first time in a long time. The sense of freedom and accomplishment is powerful and uplifting.

As she still pines for her family, frets over her own funeral arrangements, deeply misses her husband, keeps busy with mundane tasks, longs for the springtime, and worries about Rufus, Emily takes a chance and buys a new car. She surprises herself with her daring, yet remains acutely aware of the passage of time and its effect on her and those around her throughout the novel. O'Nan wonderfully captures both the inertia and momentum of aging. Emily's tale is never dull, even when it painstakingly recounts the smallest details of her daily life.

Emily's family, who lives far away, remains distant --- physically and emotionally --- for most of the novel. With so many friends and relations dead, the book is really Emily's alone. The supporting characters are all interesting and well-written, but the story is almost a solo act; yet reading over 250 pages about Emily is never dull. Even as she moves from room to room changing out boxes of tissues, O'Nan writes Emily with a compassion and humanity that draws readers in.

Despite its focus on the small and everyday, EMILY, ALONE is not without tension. But the tension here is mainly emotional, the conflict interior. Readers are lucky enough to be privy to Emily's thinking, which is sometimes funny, often bittersweet, and always quite honest. It is an elegant examination of aging, family and identity with a fine balance of the surprising and the expected. It is at once optimistic and totally realistic, and every page is a joy to read.

As a sequel or stand-alone title, EMILY, ALONE is an understated yet powerful character study from one of America's outstanding storytellers.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman