Stewart O'Nan's body of work is noteworthy for its diversity across 18 works of fiction, with settings that include post-Civil War Wisconsin, Jerusalem on the eve of Israel's statehood, and a failed Red Lobster restaurant in contemporary Connecticut. Throughout, however, he has displayed a special fondness for Pittsburgher Emily Maxwell, first seen in his 2002 novel, Wish You Were Here. She makes a fourth appearance in Evensong, a frank but deeply sympathetic portrait of a quartet of aging women who demonstrate that the challenges of advanced years need not impede one's ability to do good in the world.
Evensong centers on the work of Emily and three other women--her sister-in-law, Arlene, and their friends Kitzi and Susie (younger than the others by about 20 years), members of a volunteer network they call the Humpty Dumpty Club. The group performs a variety of tasks--picking up prescriptions and groceries, driving patients to medical appointments and the like--for older people needing assistance in their Pittsburgh neighborhoods. In the autumn of 2022, they're thrown into crisis when their longtime leader, Joan Hargrove, is hospitalized after a fall, and Kitzi is anointed as her successor.
O'Nan (Songs for the Missing) follows the women as they execute their mundane chores, and some especially challenging ones involving a pair of retired music professors and distinguished concert pianists drowning amid their hoarded possessions and a herd of cats. But as he constructs a credible plot, all the while he's digging below the surface to reveal how each woman copes with the often harsh realities of age.
Emily, widowed from her husband, Henry (the protagonist of O'Nan's novel Henry, Himself), recognizes that "after a point you outlived everyone who truly knew you," but is buoyed by the knowledge that her daughter, Margaret, is approaching the fifth anniversary of her sobriety. Arlene, an artist, slowly is coming to terms with the effects of advancing dementia. Kitzi swings between concern for her husband Martin's heart condition and her determination to rise to the demands of her new responsibilities. Susie is recently divorced and now living in an apartment that affords her only a faint echo of the life she enjoyed in her upscale suburb, but she has also taken the first tentative steps into a new relationship. O'Nan renders their small victories and defeats with honesty and more than occasional wit.
"They all had their losses," he writes, "and if time made them easier to bear, the dead were also more remote and harder to recall, a silent slideshow of old memories unchanging as the past." Despite the inevitable emotion it engenders, Evensong is noteworthy for its lack of sentimentality. Emily and her cohort are admirable survivors, resolutely absorbing the blows that life administers in one's waning years, yet rising each morning with gratitude to greet another day. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: An empathetic, but decidedly honest, reckoning with the realities of old age in the lives of a group of Pittsburgh women.