Customer Reviews

Wish You Were Here

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This book will rank up there with my most favorites. It is one of the very few books that I felt the need to really Read, not just skim through, catching the highlights. O'Nan is able to see life through and capture the emotions of both sexes and all ages. He brings the reader into his characters lives and their thoughts so that you feel for each of them. I had a hard time putting it down. I would highly recommend it.

If you like character driven stories, then you will enjoy this book. Stewart O'Nan brings such life and personality to the characters in this story that you will feel like you are part of their family and sitting right there with them before you finish the book. If you like books that are action packed and suspenseful, then this is NOT a book for you. On the other hand, if you want to read something with substance that you can really sink your teeth into, then this is a MUST read. A very enjoyable story of family, difficult situations and real life.

This book follows the week in a the life of a family, who are at their cottage on Lake Chautauqua, NY for the last time. The patriarch of the family died the previous winter after a long illness and the matriarch decided to sell the camp--and no one stopped her (not even her sister-in-law, whose family owned the camp). O'Nan takes us day by long day through the family vacation--brothers and sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews and aunts and mothers and mothers-in-law and estranged husbands and dead husbands. The whole lot of it.

You know how it is. You've been trapped into these yearly family things that everyone dreads and yet trudges to nonetheless. You know the lure of nostalgia, the childish desire to have everything stay as it once was, to never change. And you know how when you are back as a group with your siblings, you all fall into those familiar roles again.

With this book you walk through those sad pages of your life when things are coming to an end, changing. When you realize that you have not trapped your childhood or your children's childhood in amber. People die. Things change. Bridges are erected which obscure a once lovely view.

What's brilliant about this book is that you are completely sucked into these seemingly mundane days (oh! When it rains and you're all crammed inside the camp. The strange sulfur smell of the water. Taking long car trips to tourist destinations when all you want to do is be alone with your book) and you actually feel the claustrophobia of the situation. And you feel too the sad hope of some of the people that this week would never end and for others that it would hurry up and end.

Nostalgia. We live for it. We live with it. Some of us live nostalgically each day, wishing to have the light on the floor back from the morning, much in the same way does the son, Ken--always looking to find the perfect shot, the right moment to capture before they all slip away.

This is the third and by far the longest O'Nan book I've read. As with the first two, this book is written beautifully. O'Nan definately has chops as a writer and each sentence is crafted with competancy. This being said, Wish You Were Here leaves something to be desired. In this case depth and satisfaction, which seems an odd thing to say about a book of this length. All the characters have interesting aspects to their lives that could have been fleshed out to a more satisfying conclusion. But O'Nan chooses to leave all issues unresolved. This may be because he seeks realism in his work and the truth is that a lot of life is unresolved. So if a reader is looking for escapism or (Geez, I hate this word but here goes) closure, he would be wise to look elsewhere. If the reader want a slice of life that rings very true and is well delivered, than this book may be a worthwhile venture.

Wish You Were Here is an excellent and evocative look at the life of one extended family during a week's vacation at their family home on a lake in New York State. The week is bittersweet because the house is being sold. The father/grandfather has recently died and his wife decides the house is more than she can handle. This novel explores the little things, the details of the life of this family, yet still manages, in an almost sneaky way, to cover the larger issues as well. This is a rather long (over 500 pages) novel, yet I found it to be a quick read because it was so enjoyable, so evocative. The novel brings you into that vacation week, into the minor family dramas very effectively. Enjoy.

591 pages and I'm still wondering what the point was. This author seemed to miss the basic premise that a novel should have some sort of climax or the characters should have some sort of revelation but nothing happens. Even the case of a missing girl goes unresolved. None of the characters is likeable so reading this book is like spending a week with people you don't like in a place you really don't want to be and then having to watch vacation photos of the whole experience.

Time and time again I have heard people state their disappointment with this book. On some level I can understand where they are coming from. One of the first things I was taught about writing stories was that there were two necessary elements: some sort of conflict followed by a resolution or redemption. This novel never reaches a point of climax, and rather than ending in some sort of resolution it merely drops off, almost as if the author grew tired of narrating the story. I think that in order to truly appreciate this novel one must lay aside any preconceived notions of what makes a book "good". It is unlikely that the reader will finish the novel without the sense of wanting more, but in my opinion this is what makes the novel great. O'Nan has an uncanny ability to draw the reader not only into the character's world but into their very hearts. The story itself is unremarkable. There is no drama, no closure. There are only moments. That is the beauty of this novel. Even as life surrounds us with its grander scheme, we live only in moments, and ultimately they are the things that define us. This novel is unfinished because, at the end of the day, life is unfinished. Situations can be resolved but we as human beings- emotional, cognisant- cannot be. Therein lies the heart of this book, and what gives this book heart.