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, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Roxana Robinson
In spare and lovely language, Susan Minot has set forth a real life, in all its particularity and splendor and pain. This is the task of the novelist, and in "Evening" Minot has succeeded admirably.


From AudioFile
Kathryn Walker lends her silky voice to Susan Minot's riveting tale of a woman's reflection on the true love of her life, forty years after its origination. Deep in illness, Ann Grant is transported in her mind to her twenty-fifth year when she fell in love at her best friend's wedding. Minot has woven an intricate, textual tapestry of grief and deep passion that is wholly supported by Walker's performance. The wistful melodies in her tones perfectly reflect the dream-like state of Ann's memories, thereby enhancing the impact of the story as a whole. This audiobook is a welcome addition to the collections of Susan Minot fans, as well as lovers of fine storytelling in general. R.A.P. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Minot is renowned for the exquisite precision of her language and her emotional insights, traits she has elevated to new and exhilarating heights in this supremely sensual, sensitive, dramatic, and artistic novel, her finest work to date. In the present, Minot's narrator, Ann Lord, is 65 and facing certain death from cancer. It's July, she is confined to bed in her gracious Boston home, and her doctor has told her that she won't live to see the leaves change. Inebriated with pain and morphine, Ann drifts from memory to reverie to dream as her children from three marriages take turns sitting with her and conferring nervously downstairs, as Nurse Brown tends gently to her contracting body, as comforting sounds and smells drift in through open windows, and as the ceiling appears to her as a blank page on which to write her life. And what does she remember most clearly? Not her husbands, although we do get glimpses of them, and not her children's childhoods, but a summer weekend 40 years ago when she attended a close friend's elaborate wedding on a Maine island and found and lost the one true love of her life. The instant she met Harris Arden, every cell in her body went wild with a fever as overwhelming in its own way as the delirium that seizes her now. And so she tells herself the story in minute detail, recounting every stirring sea breeze, every bracing wave, every star and glint in Harris' eyes, every commanding touch of his hands, lips, limbs. It was a weekend of revelation and tragedy, and its lessons burn bright in Ann's wavering consciousness. Minot's renderings of the heat of the past and the cooling of the present are gorgeously cinematic, so rich in color and motion, music and atmosphere that sorrow and death become no less glorious than joy and life. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Minot (Folly, 1992, etc.) aims high in taking a long look at the beginning and end of a love-lifein a project thats not without its gripping moments but that requires an excess of artifice to stay aloft and doesnt steadily convince. Ann Lord, 65, is dying of cancer, attended by a nurse and her various adult offspring from three not-so-happy marriages. In matters of love, Anns entire life, it seems, has been in one way or another less than blissfulthough all might have been otherwise if things had been slightly different back in 1954when Ann was 25during a gala seaside weekend celebrating a friends marriage. Those were the three days when Ann met (The persons face seemed lit from within), loved (The great thing was happening to her),and lost (to another, by a cruel twist of fate) the ultra-handsome doctor and Korea vet whom she (though not necessarily the reader) fell in love with at first sight(His tall legs kept coming toward her). Minots decision to pin the whole weight of the novel on one weekend causes much strain, and her best successes come when she drops romance altogether and lets her character( la Mrs. Ramsay) meditate on loss and the passing of time (. . . they would last and not she . . . .The things in the house were not herself). Elsewhere, though, the burden of making the 40-year-ago weekend (the highest point in ones life) significant enough for the book to work tempts the author back into her familiar Hemingway-style filler-mode (Ann had had feelings with a few other boys and with each there was something particular . . . which was unique and it seemed that the. . . feeling around Harris Arden was more unique than usual) or into topping the story with a sensational event to try to up the psychological ante. As always with Minot, moments of incisive and telling beauty, mood, and atmosphere, but also, in this case, much thats much less. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Her best work yet, assured, supple, exhilarating in its nerve and cool momentum" --Joan Didion

"A stunning novel...a powerful story that cuts back and forth in time to give us both the defining moment in a woman's life and an understanding of how that moment has reverberated through the remainder of her days...Her evocation of her heroine's passion for Harris Arden is so convincing, her depiction of the world she inhabits is so fiercely observed...The difference between [Monkeys and Evening] attests to Susan Minot's growing ambition and
assurance as an artist" --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"An absorbing drama...Minot writes with quiet perceptiveness and grace, pulling the
reader into Ann's deathbed reverie" --Elle

"A brilliant lyric performance" --John Casey

"In spare and lovely language, Susan Minot has set forth a real life, in all its particularity and splendor and pain. This is the task of the novelist, and in Evening Minot has succeeded
admirably" --Roxana Robinson, New York Times Book Review

"It astounds in its craftsmanship and imprints itself indelibly on the heart...A haunting work of art that moves at the pace of a suspense thriller" --Sheila Bosworth, New Orleans Times-Picayune

"Evening is a beautifully realized work...more mature and confident than anything she has written...An exquisite novel" --Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

"A wonderful, truthful, heartbreaking book. . .. Evening vindicates the wildest assertions any of us have made about Susan Minot's talent" --Tom McGuane

"Evening is a supremely sensual, sensitive and dramatic novel...So rich in color and motion, music and atmosphere" --Donna Seaman, Booklist

"I was swept up in it...It moved me and made me cry" --D. T. Max, New York Observer


From the Hardcover edition.


Review
"Her best work yet, assured, supple, exhilarating in its nerve and cool momentum" --Joan Didion

"A stunning novel...a powerful story that cuts back and forth in time to give us both the defining moment in a woman's life and an understanding of how that moment has reverberated through the remainder of her days...Her evocation of her heroine's passion for Harris Arden is so convincing, her depiction of the world she inhabits is so fiercely observed...The difference between [Monkeys and Evening] attests to Susan Minot's growing ambition and
assurance as an artist" --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"An absorbing drama...Minot writes with quiet perceptiveness and grace, pulling the
reader into Ann's deathbed reverie" --Elle

"A brilliant lyric performance" --John Casey

"In spare and lovely language, Susan Minot has set forth a real life, in all its particularity and splendor and pain. This is the task of the novelist, and in Evening Minot has succeeded
admirably" --Roxana Robinson, New York Times Book Review

"It astounds in its craftsmanship and imprints itself indelibly on the heart...A haunting work of art that moves at the pace of a suspense thriller" --Sheila Bosworth, New Orleans Times-Picayune

"Evening is a beautifully realized work...more mature and confident than anything she has written...An exquisite novel" --Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

"A wonderful, truthful, heartbreaking book. . .. Evening vindicates the wildest assertions any of us have made about Susan Minot's talent" --Tom McGuane

"Evening is a supremely sensual, sensitive and dramatic novel...So rich in color and motion, music and atmosphere" --Donna Seaman, Booklist

"I was swept up in it...It moved me and made me cry" --D. T. Max, New York Observer


From the Hardcover edition.

FROM OUR EDITORS

As I Lay Dying

The plot in Susan Minot's luscious new novel, Evening, is deceptively simple. Bedridden with terminal cancer, 65-year-old Ann Lord drifts in and out of a morphine-induced reverie, recalling her husbands, children, and social life. But the most prominent thing in her mind is a long romantic weekend in the late 1950s. She was 25, and attending her best friend's wedding on an island off the coast of Maine. Also attending was the handsome Harris Arden: "Ann had had feelings with a few other boys and with each there was something particular to the person which was unique and it seemed that the particular feeling around Harris Arden was more unique than usual. There was something larger in him, in his stillness, in the way he moved. She watched him carry the suitcases to the car not hurrying but purposeful and intent and sort of angry."

Obviously Ann falls for him and he for her. There's just one catch -- two days later another wedding guest arrives, Arden's fiancée. How will things turn out?

This is a thinking reader's love story, not a Harlequin Romance. It's a love story the way The Great Gatsby is a love story. Minot's tale even ends with an auto accident as dramatic as the one that occurs on the road beneath the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.

You'll find that Evening surpasses Gatsby in terms of eroticism, however. Minot's sex scenes are dense and extended, and the earth moves for Ann even more than it did for nurse Barkley in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Yet no child happening upon Minot's sex scenes would have a clue about what was going on. For example, "There was nothing to seal off the world. The black sky did not cover them, it was the opposite of a covering, it drew them up. The sky was an example of how far distance could go. I go on forever, it said, nothing can be contained."

I recently spoke with Susan Minot about her work, but we concentrated on Thanatos, not Eros. Hell, I didn't even kiss her -- and I was going to when we first met.

Wait. I don't mean that the way it sounded. Minot and I rendezvous as strangers at a Greenwich Village French restaurant (her choice!). I recognize her from her photo. She's never seen me before in her life. Yet she leans toward my face as if she expects one of those Euro-peck greetings. I know Minot has spent time in Italy writing the script to Bernardo Bertolucci's movie, "Stealing Beauty," so I lean toward her as well -- only realizing at the last moment that not even the French buss when they meet as strangers. I whip my head back. Minot appears to miss this awkward gesture.

At our table I rub my sweaty hands on my pants and get her talking about Evening. She reveals she took five years to write it. "I started the novel in '92," she tells me. "And I was very much in the note stage. When I started work on the Bertolucci movie I was still trying to keep the novel going, but I was taken away from it when I was working on the set. When the film was over, I thought, If I don't get back to this and grab it, it's going to melt. So for the last year and a half I left New York and lived in different places, staying in friends' summer homes in the winter, just to really concentrate on the book and get it done fast." She smiles at the word "fast," adding, "A year and a half later."

How did Minot keep track of alternating between Ann's deathbed and her memories of the wedding party? Did she map the scenes out?

She nods. "There was a general structure to the book that was mapped out, but really only after half of it had been written. That's when I then tried to organize the plot a bit. It's really the backstory of the wedding, those three or four days that give the book its structure. Then the going back and forth became an intuitive thing with each draft."

I ask her to list the books that she loves. The first title off her lips is that grand Russian love story, Anna Karenina. When did she first read it? "I don't know. Probably as a teenager. I read the novel again a couple of times. If I could have written any book, Anna Karenina would be it."

We then talk about Dawn Powell. I mention the new biography of this overlooked New York writer, and Minot praises Powell's diary. Does Minot keep a diary? "I have a journal that I've been keeping for a long time. I have nearly 100 volumes."

Then I ask, "Do you ever think about your own mortality and what will happen to your journal?"

Suddenly she is frowning. "I never think about mortality," she sneers with icy sarcasm. "How can you ask that? I just wrote a book about a woman dying."

I think fast. "That doesn't mean you think about your own death."

"Oh yes it does," Minot says. "It absolutely does. You can't spend five years writing about what it's like to die without thinking about what it's going to be like to die." She pauses. "I think about death more in terms of how it makes life meaningful than what happens afterwards. That's unknowable." Then she adds, "The things that go through my mind every day are the things that were going through Ann Lord's mind as she is dying."

I backtrack to why I brought up the idea of mortality. "But your journals -- do you care if they're printed after you're dead?"

"It's out of my control," she answers. "No one would want to publish 100 volumes of my journals."

"With web sites, who knows," I say. "Readers may want to download the 'One Hundred Journals of Susan Minot.'"

The moment after I speak her name, she says, "Let me tell you how to pronounce it really." I referred to her as Min-knot. Wrong. "It's what you do with gold," she laughs. "You mine it." Ah. Susan Mine-it. "It's the most flattened-out Americanized version possible."

I practice saying her name, "Susan Minot, Susan Minot, Susan Minot." Then I stop. I could be misconstrued as a lovelorn fool. Then Minot tells me that she's just finished writing the screenplay of Evening for Disney. Wow. I'm impressed that they'd want to make an intelligent movie that has no car chases or special effects.

"There actually are a lot of special effects in Evening," Minot said. "The sort of dreamlike back and forth in time. People walking on water. Birds flying into a room. Grass growing out of a bed."

Ah. I forgot to mention the magic realism attending Ann Grant's death.

"Here's another book I can promote," Minot suddenly says. "I just wrote an introduction to Louise de Vilmorin's Madame De. I never knew it was a short story. I just knew the Max Ophuls film."

Then Minot reveals that she spends much of her time in Africa. She talks about taking the Lunatic Express, an "old rattletrap train that was probably built in the '40s" that runs across the Tsavo desert between Kenya and Tanzania. I ask her if Africa has become her place, like it had for Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham (Minot having praised Out of Africa and West with the Night).

"I feel that I am exploring the world and places that I don't know well," she tells me. "When you look at all the practical problems in the world it sometimes seems a little indulgent to be writing." She pauses, then says, "I do believe that it is worthwhile to write." Adding, "Though not in an apparent, practical way."

As the interview ends and I hand Minot a copy of her lovely unpractical love story Evening to sign, it dawns on me that our conversation could have come from the book. Although Ann never had to endure a grilling by a book reviewer, she does recall awkward encounters in her life. She remembers a dinner date when a boy (not Arden) tries to give her a wedding ring. She refuses to accept it. He walks out of the restaurant into the snow. "He turned around. There were wet streaks on his face. He wiped them with a flat palm, and his gaze shot upward to the windows of the lounge where they had sat, considering something -- how things might have gone otherwise -- thinking what he left behind...."

I thanked God that it was too early for snow and that I wasn't in fact some lovelorn fool, and stepped out of the restaurant to the sidewalk of Sixth Avenue.

—David Bowman

FROM THE PUBLISHER

During a summer weekend on the coast of Maine, at the wedding of her best friend, Ann Grant fell in love. She was 25. 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 25 - in a singular time of complete surrender - Ann discovers the highest point of her life.

SYNOPSIS

In Minot's atmospheric novel, a woman dying of cancer reminisces about the pivotal weekend 25 years past that could have changed the course of her life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Aida Edemeriam

In Evening, Minot's highly crafted, lyrical prose carries the reader through layering, drifting circles of memory....Part of the joy of Minot's prose is that it asks for, and survives, close scrutiny. -- National Post(Toronto)

Jill Smolowe

In her powerful third novel Susan Minot mesmerizes with her convincing evocation of Lord's final semiconscious state, wherein time and place crisscross, the lines between real and imagined blur, and the difference between resignation and regret is indistinguishable. -- Time Magazine

Lisa Shea

An absorbing drama. . . Minot writes with quiet perceptiveness and grace, pulling the reader into Ann's deathbed reverie. -- Elle

Roxana Robinson - The New York Times Book Review

One of the pleasures of this book lies in the elegance and assurance of the prose. . . .The narrative drive is sustained by the mounting tension of the early story. . . .In spare and lovely language, Susan Minot has set forth a real life, in all its particularity and splendor and pain.

Sheila Bosworth

It astounds in its craftsmanship and imprints inself indelibly on the heart. . .A haunting work of art that moves at the pace of a suspense thriller. —New Orleans Times-Picayune Read all 16 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

A brilliant lyric performance. — John Casey

Her best work yet. . . .assured, supple, exhilarating in its nerve and cool momentum. — Joan Didion