Evening [Paperback]

Susan Minot (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 7, 1999 | Series: Vintage Contemporaries

With two novels and one short story collection published to overwhelming critical acclaim ("Monkeys takes your breath away," said Anne Tyler; "heartbreaking, exhilarating," raved the New York Times Book Review), 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. Evening unfolds in the rushlight of that memory, as Ann relives those three vivid days on the New England coast, with motorboats buzzing and bands playing in the night, and the devastating tragedy that followed a spectacular wedding. Here, in the surge of hope and possibility that coursed through her at twenty-five--in a singular time of complete surrender--Ann discovers the highest point of her life. Superbly written and miraculously uplifting, Evening is a stirring exploration of time and memory, of love's transcendence and of its failure to transcend--a rich testament to the depths of grief and passion, and a stunning achievement.

Editorial Reviews

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 --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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; First Edition edition (September 7, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375700269
• ISBN-13: 978-0375700262
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (132 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #375,047 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist and short story writer whose books include Monkeys, Folly, Lust & Other Stories, and Evening, which was adapted into the feature film of the same name starring Meryl Streep. Minot was born in Boston and raised in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, attended Brown University, and received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She currently lives with her daughter in both New York City and an island off the coast of Maine.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

60 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Evening to Remember..., August 27, 2001

By 

Dianna Johnston "Compulsive Reader" (Joplin, MO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Evening (Paperback)

After spending a couple of years on my bookshelf, I was finally tempted to read this novel. Evening is unlike anything I've ever read before. The prose is not clear-cut, with ramblings and confusion throughout the entire novel, but once readers get into the flow of the story, this morphine-induced reality-versus-fantasy begins to take shape. Evening tells the story of Ann Lord, a 65-year-old cancer patient on the verge of death. Family and friends take vigil at her bedside, and through the haze and confusion of Ann's heavily sedated mind are many ramblings about unconnected things, short memories that pass through in an instant then quickly dissolve. Only one thing remains sharp in Ann's mind: the weekend she spent at her best friend's wedding and the man she met there with whom she fell in love. Harris Arden was not just a weekend fling, he became the pivotal moment in Ann's life from which love, loss, hope and reality begin. Susan Minot's stunning, eloquent prose writes of a love story between Ann and Harris; a life story involving Ann's three husbands and her five children; and a death story of the final moments of a woman's life and those things that can never be left behind. Choppy at times, confusing at others, but this unique writing style creates an authentic other world where consciousness slips between reality and dreams. Excellent and powerful; a vivid portrayal of the end of a life.

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Difficult to embrace, July 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Evening (Hardcover)

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A SINGULAR STORY OF LOVE AND LOSS, June 7, 2007

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Evening (Audio CD)

Broadway and television actress, Emmy Award winner for her performance in the PBS series The Adams Chronicles, Kathryn Walker has a varied and busy career. Born in Philadelphia she made her debut in an off Broadway production in 1971. It didn't take long for her to reach Broadway in such stellar offerings as "Private Lives" and "Wild Honey." Her film roles are many, and she has often appeared on daytime television. This is an actress perfectly suited to give voice to Minot's superb story of love and loss.

In the summer of 1954 Ann Grant traveled from New York City to coastal Maine to be a bridesmaid in a good friend's wedding. She was 25, and it was there that she met Harris Arden. She had heard his name mentioned, but she had expected someone older. He was young, handsome, and they fell in love, almost immediately, fully, and passionately.

That was a weekend she would always remember because Harris was engaged to a girl in Chicago, and he would marry her. Ann, too, would marry, several times.

In the present narrative it is years later, we hear: "In her sixty-five years Ann Lord had kept herself busy and was not particularly reflective but now forced to lie here day after day she found herself visited by certain reflections. Life would not hold any more surprises for her, she thought, all that was left was for her to get through this last thing."

Ann is dying, at times lucid, at other times seemingly lost in delirium where she relives that weekend of long ago.

An incredible writer, Susan Minot has fashioned a singular story of love and loss, life and death. To hear this author's exquisite prose is a rare treat, to hear it read by Kathryn Walker enriches the experience.

- Gail Cooke