Evening

by: Susan Minot

Published by: Vintage Books

Reviewed by Andrea Sisco

Evening has been adapted for the large screen. Its cast includes the likes of Meryl Streep, Claire Danes, Toni Collette and Vanessa Redgrave. Impressive!

Ann Grant Lord is dying of cancer in the bedroom of her Massachusetts home. She’s surrounded by her children and the comings and goings of her doctor and old friends. The snatches of conversations she overhears as she slips in and out of consciousness mixes with her thoughts and she revisits moments from her sixty-five years, three marriages and five children. But the time she reflects on the most, and embraces fully, is a long-ago weekend where love and passion collide with what cannot ever be.

It’s the summer of 1954 and Ann Grant is twenty-five years old. She’s left New York City and traveled to Maine where she is to be a bridesmaid in her friend, Lila Wittenborn’s wedding. Also at the Wittenborn’s home for the weekend wedding celebration is a young doctor from Chicago, Arden Harris. The two fall completely and passionately in love and their relationship is played out in the course of a brief weekend.

Minot is an incredible storyteller. She’s skillfully navigates the past and present into a seamless story of love, loss, life, death—and gives you a good hard look at choices and consequences. Her prose is so vivid I thought I could hear Anne’s heart beat, or feel her rasping breath in my own chest. And I thought about, deeply, my life and the paths I chose and wondered if I would have the opportunity before death to revisit those life-altering moments in the fullest sense.

Armchair Interviews says: A stunning novel and a grand finale for Ann Lord.