"Evensong" is Stewart O'Nan's eighteenth novel. Over the past thirty years O'Nan has explored all kinds of literary territory--"The Good Wife" covers a young woman waiting twenty years as her husband serves a life sentence for murder. "The Night Country" is a sly suburban nod to Ray Bradbury, full of ghosts and the troubled souls of those still on Earth. In "West of Sunset" he explored the difficult final years of F. Scott Fitzgerald, as he dug himself out of debt by writing screenplays.
But time and time O'nan returns to the Maxwell clan, a seemingly ordinary family in Pittsburgh . "Emily, Alone" gave us a few months with, well, Emily, an elderly window who has to find meaningful ways to fill her days, even though her family has moved away. A decade later O'Nan wrote the companion book (my personal favorite in the series), the tender and big-hearted "Henry, Himself", reviewed in this blog.
"Evensong" is altogether different beast. Instead of a vivid character portrait of a single person struggling with loss and haunted by their past, O'Nan has created a sort of geriatric Justice League around Emily--the Humpty Dumpty Club, a group of women who swoop through Pittsburgh running errands for, and sometimes sitting in hospital rooms, for those who need a helping hand.
Besides Emily we follow Arlene, her space cadet sister-in-law whose struggle with the early stages of dementia is making her day to day life harrowing. These were, for me, by far the most moving chapters of the book. Arlene always felt like a supporting character in the other Maxwell books, often seen through Emily's withering gaze as an eccentric with questionable taste. In "Evensong" we truly get to peer inside Arlene's heart, leaning all about her passion for painting, a young romance that she's kept hidden from everyone (including Emily) and, in book's most touching chapter, her struggles to remember what a Target store is after she compares lost in her own hometown.
Rounding out the book are two new characters, Kitzi and Susie. Some of their sections failed to come alive for me for a very particular reason. Over the course of "Emily, Alone" and "Henry, Himself" I grew to care deeply about the Maxwells and found myself thinking of what they were up to years after I'd finish the books, hoping that we'd return to their seemingly ordinary world. But Emily and Arlene all too often have to share the stage with characters who just aren't as compelling (at one point Susie admits that she sees herself as a boring person) and the few new details we learn about Emily's family (her alcoholic daughter is now a drug counselor) are covered in passing.
Fans of O'Nan are going to connect with the book because he focuses on one of his favorite themes--how we go on in the face of loss, and how we look down the barrel of our own mortality. The best Kitzi sections find her keeping an eye on Gene and Jean, a pair of hoarder concert pianists who live in a Gothic home overrun with cats. These characters are some of the strangest O'Nan has created since his own Gothic past, reminding me of the strange men and women who filled his plague novel "A Prayer for the Dying". As odd as Gene and Jean are, their helplessness is handled with compassion by O'Nan.
With "Emily, Alone" and "Henry, Himself" I always told potential readers "Sure, it's part of a series, but each book stands on its own." This simply isn't the case here; I doubt readers who are unfamiliar with Emily's family history will love this book. But readers like myself will be thrilled to once again invite these characters into our minds, and our hearts.
