This is the first book that I have read by O’Nan, it surfaced on my Facebook feed from NPR. The review was actually for Emily, Alone, the sequel to Wish You Were Here. Here is the link:
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/23/137084790/nancy-pearl-presents-10-terrific-summer-reads?sc=fb&cc=fp
This was something that I did not realize until I was at Barnes and Noble ( Borders is my choice bookstore, but my beloved store by my house closed down). I decided to fully invest the books and I started with WYWH.
What drew me in to the book was that it was described as a character driven novel, which is right in my wheelhouse. Emily, Alone is about an elderly women coping with life in her later years. I have read a tremendous amount of books about adolescence, but not many about the twilight years. This was the initial draw.
WYWH follows a week in the life of a small family vacationing at their summer cottage for one last time before it is sold. The cast of characters include: Emily, the recently widowed matriarch, Arlene, her sister-in-law, Kenneth, the failed artist son and his wife Lisa and their son and daughter Sam and Ella, Meg, the recovering everything, recently separated daughter and her son Justin and daughter Sarah. The funny thing about this book is that I did the bulk of the reading while vacationing up north at my own cottage this past weekend. Luckily, my family is no where near as dysfunctional as Maxwells.
Emily has sold the cottage and the family and all of their individual and collective problems ascend upon the retreat for one final trip. The book is broken down into 7 parts, one for each day of the week that they are there. Within those 7 parts each character gets a turn to discuss the day’s events. O’Nan does an incredible job of speaking for each of the characters in their own unique way even though each is vastly different from each other. The style is reminiscent of The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, another wonderful book that speaks for so many different characters in a way that is authentic and raw.
The book is vast, over 500 pages, but reads very quickly; much of it is dialogue. But the best parts are the unspoken uneasiness that comes with a forced family outing. His detail and insight of being a 14 year old girl, a 50 year old schoolmarm, and a failed middle aged artist all within pages of each other is amazing. Through O’Nan’s writing you can actually feel the eye rolls, shifts in sitting positions and sighs. There were even times that when one character would do something, I would think to myself as if they were real people, “Oh man, Emily is not going to like that”. When I was not reading the book I was thinking about the characters as if they were real people in my life; this is always a sign of a good book. This is the similar reaction that I had to one of my many favorite books: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.
Do you like dysfunctional families? Stories of universal human annoyance? I totally recommend this book.
Next up: Emily, Alone by Stewart O’Nan. The sequel to Wish You Were Here.
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