53 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Complex and accurate family portrait, June 15, 2002
Stewart O'Nan has done here--successfully--what one of the members of the family he portrays longs to do as a photographic work: he captures the summer world of Lake Chautauqua, where time moves slowly and every change seems a betrayal of memory, rather than a step in progress. But this only the setting; the true stars of this drama are the family. O'Nan examines its web of relationships, politics and attitudes with an uncannily accurate eye. He assumes each character's point of view lovingly; he knows them all, young and old, male and female. And so do we, because we've been there ourselves--the recognition is half the fun of the reading. The detail, too, is marvelous: whose workbench, for example, has never been graced with a Chock-Full-O-Nuts can crammed with dead paintbrushes? Wish You Were Here reminds us what a flawed species we are, so eager to turn away from each other to search for that Something that must, by nature, elude us--the perfect light, the impossible love, the exquisite memory, the undiluted attention of our parents. There are no jarring plot twists, no car chases, no fights-to-the-death, no special effects--just fine writing, arresting characters, right-on dialogue (spoken and internal) and a week's crash course in what makes us bizarre creatures tick. Read; recognize; enjoy.
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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
1/2 will hate it, some won't finish it, some love it, November 3, 2004
Wish You Were Here details (and I mean details) the last week a family spends at their cottage in Chautauqua NY before it's sold by the recently widowed matriarch, Emily. O'Nan follows the various family dynamics, both entrenched (long-standing parent-child issues) and newly formed (recent divorce, budding adolescence), across three generations--Emily and her sister-in-law Arlene, Emily's two children Meg and Ken and her daughter-in-law Lisa, and finally the grandchildren, timid Justin, temptress Sarah, pain-in-the-butt boy Sam, and plain but smart Ella, who has a newly-awakened crush on her cousin Sarah. There are lots of issues to go around: Meg's divorce, recent alcohol rehab, money troubles, and deteriorating relationship with her kids; Ken's downward employment spiral, his flailing attempts at photography as an artistic career, his rough-edged marriage; Lisa's inability to connect with her mother-in-law and more recently her husband; Arlene's coming to terms with her age, her singleness, her lack of children, her resentment over the sale of the family cottage; Emily's difficult relationships with her children, sorrow over her dead husband, her sense of her own mortality, her sense of loss with the cottage. Throw in four on-the-cusp of adolescence children (two of them going through a rough divorce, one a possible breakup, and another a same-sex crush) and a missing neighborhood girl, and O'Nan lacks for little to cover.
And he covers it all. Wish You Were Here is kind of like the old joke--"I spent a week in Philly (or fill in your own city) one night". The pace is very slow, the lengthy book divided up by days in the single week covered and the detail is sometimes perhaps more than necessary (how many bathroom scenes does one book need?). It's easy to predict that many, in fact, will find the book too slow, too filled with mind-numbing detail. That many will not bother finishing it or hate the fact that they feel compelled to finish it.
If one accepts the slow, wandering pace, though, and lets the detail settle around like a fine mist rather than trying to slog through it like a field of waist-high weeds, the book is highly rewarding. Not for its plot, of which there is little. But for its sharp humanistic detail, its warm characterization, its vivid tiny moments that most of us would recognize from our own lives. At first, the characters seem pretty stock: bitter daughter-in-law, jealous sister, plain but smart teen girl, timid boy, etc. But as the book delves into each character, either through their own point-of-view, which shifts among them, or through other characters' insights about them, one starts to realize just how complex they are. They move beyond their surface roles and become fully fleshed characters, interacting through moments of pain, anger, sorrow, resentment, tedium, frustration and on and on through the panoply of emotions we all do on a daily basis. One feels for each of them, some more than others (Ella and Arlene stand out for me), but still for each. Each has his or her moment. Or more accurately, a string of them.
The book will certainly not be to everyone's taste. The pace is slow. The detail dense and cumulative. The ending anti-climatic. If you find yourself fighting your way through the first hundred pages, it's probably not worth the pain as it's more of the same. But if you find yourself settling in, smiling or wincing to yourself at something a character says, does, or thinks, then make yourself comfortable because you won't be coming up for a while. Strongly recommended.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lovely and Amazing, March 5, 2003
By A Customer
It's not surprising that a book like this brings out bipolar reaction such as we've seen here: you either love it or you don't. Count me as one of the ones who love it -- for me, this was a page-turner. The depth that O'Nan reaches with each of these characters is remarkable, every one of them so finely constructed. He also nails the general discomfort of family vacations better than anyone.
I've read all of O'Nan's novels, and for me, this is his most accomplished work to date. It is a work that is unafraid to be uncompromising in its scope and its intent.
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