From time to time [Ann] returns to her present body and examines the progress of her death with detached interest. "The world shifted as if a piece of paper had been flipped and she was now living on the other side." She is drugged, she watches the nurses. We listen to her children downstairs fuss about unfaithful partners, divorce, ice cream, what will happen with the house and its contents.

Susan Minot wraps up the process of falling in love so completely that one wonders whether there will ever be anything else to say.

EVENING

Saturday, October 24, 1998

By Susan Minot  

Knopf, 288 pages, $32

Beauty stills the mind, they say, its power as a meditation object second only to meeting a saint. And in literary fiction, for the past 15 years, particularly among younger women practitioners, particularly Americans, and especially those who have gone to the Iowa Writers Workshop, the inclination has been to polish an image or a sentence until when read, the reader's mind, struck, wheels off onto a thousand reflections. Gorgeous but not good for story, and not all that terrific for sales, meditation often being a painful process. Evening ,Susan Minot's fourth novel, pretty much solves this problem: Through her development of remarkable art, she has her cake and eats it too.

Ann Lord is 65. It is July, she has cancer, and she will not live to see the leaves turn. She has been married three times, and has five children. She is a wealthy, stylish New Englander with a racy past, she lies in her canopy bed, in a big house on a leafy street. Her children are downstairs waiting. Friends of decades come to say good-bye. Ann can barely rouse interest. She is living almost entirely in a confusion of moments 40 years ago: the weekend that she met the love of her life and lost him. She remembers tidy haircuts being blown in fingerprint gusts, tilted fields of purple lupin, restaurants with orange claws over their doors, her yellow suitcase with its shellacked sides, and a sign that read "Free Beets Monday."

It is 1954, she is 25, and the MG window "frames a sky of indistinct clouds and tall grasses flashing by, as if it were a delicately rendered structure wired and bolted together reflecting mirror-like the configuration of her heart. She felt as if she had been hit in the forehead with a brick."

Lost love is one of literature's enduring themes, and one Minot returns to obsessively and with reward. In image after image after reported gesture, she wraps up the process of falling in love so completely that one wonders whether there will ever be anything else to say.

When Ann first looks into Harris's eyes, she looks instinctively away as one is taught to do if there is an eclipse of the sun. Every moment of that first weekend is detailed with sublime sensuality, unsentimental, stark and truthful, and the reader is dragged along. The desire to know what happens overwhelms sense, breakfast and trivialities such as work and sleep. Even though you suspect the love is impossible, if you ever lost a love -- and which hard-hearted soul among us has not -- the how of each person's loss has all the fascination of a train wreck, and Minot's writing is so good that the combination is thrilling.

From time to time Ann returns to her present body and examines the progress of her death with detached interest. "The world shifted as if a piece of paper had been flipped and she was now living on the other side." She is drugged, she watches the nurses. We listen to her children downstairs fuss about unfaithful partners, divorce, ice cream, what will happen with the house and its contents. Visitors illumine fragments of her history and she thinks about the lie her life became after that weekend, filled with the details of a woman who marries and has children and not a job: the clothes, the social life, jewellery and tears, marital sex, heart attacks and meeting women for lunch in town on fogged winter days. A snowfall of indiscriminate images dusts over her. She muses about memory, and wonders where hers will go. They will disappear, she concludes. The sheer drudgery of death is laid open. Her lover visits her, they talk, and then he vanishes.

The subject chooses the writer, some suggest. In Evening ,Minot twins love and death as if to make her point crystal clear: Love and the losing of it is death, for at no other time are we so acutely aware of the evanescence of every precious moment. For most of those of us who have such an event in our past, it is tidied up and forgotten. For Ann Lord, it is not. "She felt better knowing he was in the room. Just give me your hand, she said. We wasted so much time."

Contributing reviewer Elizabeth Nickson is a writer living on Salt Spring Island, B.C.