Word: ann
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...Evening is fundamentally a revision of the timeworn cliché, "I saw my life passing before my eyes." The central thread at work is Ann's extended flashback of the summer weekend in which she met Harris Arden, a weekend which draws itself out over the entire novel in a lush, lingering continuum of heightened sensations, the country setting of water and trees providing the perfect isolated arena for Ann's realizations about life to flower. For the first time, she realizes that "falling in love" can mean talking control of one's own life. In Ann's words, "Every...
...midst of her remembrance, Ann recalls a last conversation with Harris, while we also gain glimpses of her children, anxiously waiting at her bedside as her death draws near. There is nothing new about the intervening years between Ann's encounter with Harris and the time of her illness; she marries three times, has children and deals with her husbands one by one as they betray her or die or simply leave...
Truth be told, the plot is hardly action-packed or particularly original, but this doesn't mean that Evening is any less interesting to read. Minot saves us from boredom through her experimentation with words, which becomes the true focal point of the novel and admirably recreates Ann's sentiments and state of mind. At times, the boundaries of grammar dissolve into an endless stream of images that jump from fragments of one remembered moment or conversation to another. Smelling the balsam in a cushion someone gave her, for instance, sets off a chain of memory in which...
...fluidity of Minot's language is not as jarring as it might be. We always know that her narrative is moving forward toward something, although like her characters, we must wait for it to arise. Ultimately, Minot conveys the sense that there is nothing extraordinarily unsettling, or sad, about Ann's years of waiting. Similarly, there is nothing extraordinarily sad in the conversations Ann's children have among themselves...
...fact, although tragic things happen to them, there is nothing inherently tragic about any of Minot's characters, partially because they are never really developed as solid individuals with weaknesses we can identify. They are, rather, presences, whether the powerful presence of Harris, or the flirty presence of Ann's friend Gigi Wittenborn. We get a sense of two Anns--Ann Grant and Ann Lord, the Ann of her youth who was dazzled by Harris Arden, the older, married Ann who has spent her life waiting--yet it is difficult to place how exactly they are different except in name...