Powerful meditative language unfolds love story of `Evening’

EVENING by Susan Minot, Vintage Books, New York, 1998, paperback, 264 pages, $12.

Susan Minot’s “Evening” begins with a line from “The Sound and the Fury,” an excerpt that delivers an emotional wallop to those who know and love the Faulkner masterpiece:

“I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.”

The epigraph tells us much about the content of Minot’s latest novel, which is all about time, and the writing style, which is free-fall stream-of-consciousness directly indebted to Faulkner. It’s one of those stories that looks static on the surface: Ann Lord, well-to-do, elderly society lady, lies on her deathbed in Cambridge, Mass., remembering the weekend-long love affair that made up her most intense living, 40 years earlier, when she was 25.

The young woman meets Harris Arden at a wedding on an island off the coast of Maine, falls in love at first sight, and lives fully for a few hours before his fiancee arrives from Chicago. Ann never sees him again after that weekend, and none of her three marriages approaches the intensity of that interlude.

Whenever love blooms or death draws near in fiction, there’s potential for melodrama. “Evening” welds these two dramas together, making them weirdly inseparable, and Minot cannot completely avoid the temptations of excess. The New York Times Book Review applauded the book’s “spare and lovely language”; while “lovely” is undeniable, “spare” seems like a stretch.

To be sure, these are simple words, the best kind of words to evoke an emotional landscape. “The moon passed in and out of clouds and the grass was wet and her sandals were wet through in the thick grass,” she writes. “They took careful steps pretending to concentrate on their feet but she was thinking of their arms and their hands. She floated in the darkness on his arm … She smelled marigolds, she smelled pine.”

Sometimes the accumulation of description — and the description does accumulate — effectively evokes a tumbling forward, into love or pain or loss or fearless living. Other times, it’s a swamp of self-awareness that mires the novel’s surprising suspense. On occasion the pitch goes slack and parochial: “She relived it thinking, I will always have this, this will always be with me, his hand flat on my chest, no one can take it, I will never forget it. Nothing would alter its vividness, she would never lose it.”

Minot dedicates the book to three individuals who have died since 1990; it’s clear she’s been near death, studying it, and the reflection shows in her treatment of the dying Ann Lord. Her cancer is “sharp black teeth imbedded in her side”; the pain of ending, ultimately indescribable, is deftly linked to the rest of life, and so yanked halfway into our grasp.

“Childbirth had been overwhelming and like nothing else but she got the babies out of it,” Minot writes, “the babies who looked at her with a complete look … lying across her chest like a prize.”

With that image alone, of a baby giving its mother “a complete look,” Minot accesses a level of literary excellence denied most writers. That’s writing so dead-on it transcends description, becoming the thing itself, the very definition of a baby’s look.

There are different levels of discourse in “Evening.” Downstairs, the dying woman’s daughters wonder about the “Harris” whose name she utters half-conscious, showing the limits of their knowledge of their mother. Harris himself, in some kind of spirit form, perches by Ann’s bed and looks back with her. A nurse records the bare facts of the last days in her notebook.

In this meditation on memory, Minot raises the most essential questions about what matters and what is lost. In the end, the sum of a life is fragments, she says, not because we forget the things that would hold them together, but because the most important moments — often the least expected — rise to the surface. Most of us live in full only briefly, she suggests, the equivalent, in a lifetime, of fractions of seconds.