Awards
Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998.
A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.
Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"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....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." Booklist
Review
"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
About the Author
Susan Minot was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Manchester-by-the-Sea. She studied writing and painting at Brown University and received an MFA in writing from Columbia University. After publishing short stories in
Grand Street and
The New Yorker she was offered a contract for a novel by the legendary publisher Seymour Lawrence. His initial support for "a work of fiction" became
Monkeys, nine stories which together make up a novel about the Vincent family. It was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Etranger in France in l987.
The novel was followed by Lust & Other Stories, a collection about wayward artists and journalists living in New York City, particularly about the relations between men and women in their twenties and thirties having difficulty coming together and difficulty breaking apart. In l994 she was contacted by the director Bernardo Bertolucci to write the screenplay for his film Stealing Beauty. Her other books are Folly and Evening. Minot lives in New York City.
Reading Group Guide
1. Minot gives the novel an epigraph from William Faulkner: “I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.” How does this quotation relate to
Evening? Does Ann try to “conquer” time?
2. Minot renders Anns thoughts in what might be called stream-of-consciousness. Which things does Ann remember most distinctly? Which does she remember least distinctly? Which does she repress? What does the relative weight she allows each memory tell us about the emotional shape of her life?
3. Outsiders see Ann rather differently than she sees herself. Her daughter Constance, for instance, says that “her big thing” is “her stuff”; “Thats what she cared about, her house and her pictures and all her things” [p. 129]. Her daughters imply that she doesnt laugh much [p. 32]. The doctors wife says Ann is “just like other women, maybe a little more stylish if you had to say something, but like other women” [p. 12]. What, if anything, does this elderly Ann have in common with the young, passionate Ann she still feels herself to be? What does this dichotomy imply about the differences between our inner selves and the outer person our friends and family see?
4. What might have attracted Ann to each of her three husbands? How did she come to view each of them as the years went by? How does the language in which Ann recalls her marriages differ from the language in which she recalls Harris, and what does this difference in language tell us about her feelings?
5. Ann wishes that she “might have been able to read the spirit within herself and would not have spent her life as if she were only halfway in it” [p. 137], then goes on to reflect that “her life had not been long enough for her to know the whole of herself, it had not been long enough or wide” [ibid]. In what ways has it not been wide enough? Does the fault for this lie with the cruelty of fate, or with Ann herself? If fault lies with Ann, what might she have done to make things different?
6. How would you describe each of Anns children? How has each been molded and shaped by his or her relationship with her? How does each of them behave toward her? Has the essential sadness of Anns life rubbed off on them?
7. How has Pauls death affected Ann, Teddy, and the other children? Has it made them closer, or estranged them from one another? How, and at what times, is Ann compelled to remember Paul?
8. What sort of a person is Harris, really? What do you deduce about him and about his feelings, principles, and desires from his behavior, from what others say about him, and from the short section written from his point of view [p. 232-233]?
9. In one of Anns imaginary discussions with Harris, he says that she might have become a little “hard” [page 224]. Does this seem a fair assessment, judging from what you know of the older Ann? If so, how does this hardness manifest itself and why has she become hard?
10. How does Minot thematically link Buddys fate with the fate of Ann and Harriss romance? In what ways is this particular weekend the turning point in Anns life, and how has Buddys fate intensified this process of change?
11. Does Ann ever feel responsible for what happened to Buddy? Does Harris? Does a sense of responsibility for this tragedy, or a lack of one, have any specific effect on Anns future life?
12. Ann conducts a number of imagined conversations with Harris in which the two meet again, for the first time in forty years. What sort of person is this elderly, imaginary Harris? Is he the sort of character you can imagine the young Harris growing into? How do you think the real sixty-five-year-old Harris might remember Ann?
13. If Ann and Harris had married, what sort of a life might they have had? Would they have been happy together? Might Ann have been unhappy and unfulfilled even with Harris?
14. The reader of Evening can extract two entirely different messages from the novel. From one point of view, Ann met in Harris the great love of her life, the one true man for her, and his loss inevitably blighted her life and made it tragic. From another point of view, Ann has wasted her life brooding over a man who is, when all is said and done, not much better than any other man. Which vision do you believe? Which point do you think the author intends to get across? Does she imply that the great, overwhelming passion of romantic love is true and that our happiness depends on following it? Or that it is false, a trap in which we are apt to throw away our lives and our happiness?
The questions, discussion topics and suggested reading list that follow are intended to enhance your group's experience of reading Susan Minot's Evening. We hope they will provide you with many new angles from which to approach this rich and poetic work by one of America's most powerful and emotionally evocative novelists.