Ann Lord is waiting for death; it is a long, slow and painful wait. She is dying of cancer. Her consciousness shifts between her passive vigil, visited by people she scarcely notices, and vivid, often fragmented scenes from her life. We see her as she once was; others, particularly her adult children, see her as she is now. Susan Minot's powerful new novel, Evening (Chatto) is a dramatic endorsement of all the praise she has enjoyed since the publication of her first book, Monkeys, a lively and touching domestic saga, a Yankee variation of To the Lighthouse, barely more than novella-length, which was published to ecstatic reviews in the US in 1986, and proved equally successful in Britain. That book brought Minot to the first rank of US writing and there she has remained, an outstanding new talent. It seemed she could do no wrong, even when not publishing anything.
Lust (1989), a collection of short stories, drew comparisons with Carver. If the Whartonesque Folly (1993) disappointed, it somehow left Minot's reputation untouched, so enduring is the appeal of Monkeys. With Evening, Minot has not only justified a hitherto inflated reputation, but has matured into a remarkable writer. This is one of those rare novels few readers will forget, and Minot's achievement lies not only in the graceful, impressionistic style but the detached, almost determinedly unsentimental attitude she maintains toward her not particularly appealing but increasingly vulnerable central character: "In her sixty-five years Ann Lord had kept herself busy and was not particularly reflective but now forced to lie here day after day she found herself visited by certain reflections. Life would hold no more surprises for her, she thought, all that was left was for her to get through this one last thing."
Three marriages and five children, one of whom died at eleven, travel and friendship and privilege, have done little to fill the vast emptiness of her life. As she faces death, she returns to the only real experience she ever had, a fleeting few days of romance while attending the wedding of a friend.
On the surface, the story is simple, a series of flashbacks, at times hazy, at time exact, juxtaposed with the brutal realities of the daily routine of dying. Ann's nurse, logging her decline, is not without humanity but can do nothing except modify an increasingly impossible pain. Meanwhile Ann reaches a series of understandings: "The images kept coming, vague and scattered . . . How was one to make room and to keep all of them? The answer which Ann Lord knew now having lived a life was that one did not. Things were forgotten. An astonishing amount of what one had known had simply disappeared."
It becomes obvious that she has never let go of that brief early romance of forty years earlier. From her death bed she wills her mind back to a summer day when she had been met at Boston by two young men who are part of her social circle, and with them is a stranger. Minot makes it clear that Ann is beautiful, confident and much sought after, but now her poise evaporates.
Ann's world shrinks to an intense, small space filled by Arden Harris, the good-looking newcomer, who quickly attracts the attention of most of the available young women. Ann watches his every movement, looking for the slightest indication of interest in anyone. He quickly draws her in, just as Minot draws in the reader by offering glimpses of Ann's other lives: the babies she tended, the clothes she wore, a show, a hat, a holiday. All of these details, lists, remembered physical sensations crowd the mind of the dying and confused woman. "For two days a life the size of a ham hung in the air one foot from her face." It is as if she has only begun to live now she is dying. For her watching children she is already gone and the mother they knew is remembered as cool, remote, interested only in the things she amassed. Once divorced and twice widowed, Ann only knew these husbands only at a remove. They are evoked with effort and are given no more importance that minor players. All her love and vitality was ursurped by Arden. The various flashbacks to the wedding in Boston contain insights into the privileged existence of a group of young people used to moving between large houses and sharing the hospitality provided by their parents. Once the romance is established between Ann and Arden, the facts of his life are presented. His fiancee is due to join the party. But he now wants Ann, and the closer he holds her, the more obsessed she becomes, and the further he moves away, back towards his long-time girlfriend, who, it transpires, is pregnant. However, the further he slides away, the harder he works at securing Ann. Minot has taken the commonplace facts of a man's last fling and shown how it led to the destruction of a young woman whose real life ends with his rejection and whose subsequent existence belongs to the shadows. In old age Ann finally makes sense of life. There are no surprises here, no tricks; the power of the book is in Minot's excruciating exploration of a woman betrayed by the intensity of feelings created by something fleeting and shallow. This is a sophisticated, sombre, often elegiac novel. Evening is about power-shifts and a form of civilised revenge. The story is secondary to the emotions awakened and hopeless love which has created a death-in-life. Above all, Minot examines the relentless and elusive way memory controls existence.
