Also attending was the handsome Harris Arden: "Ann had had feelings with a few other boys and with each there was something particular to the person which was unique and it seemed that the particular feeling around Harris Arden was more unique than usual. There was something larger in him, in his stillness, in the way he moved. She watched him carry the suitcases to the car not hurrying but purposeful and intent and sort of angry." Obviously Ann falls for him and he for her. There's just one catch -- two days later another wedding guest arrives, Arden's fiancée. How will things turn out?

This is a thinking reader's love story, not a Harlequin Romance. It's a love story the way The Great Gatsby is a love story. Minot's tale even ends with an auto accident as dramatic as the one that occurs on the road beneath the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. You'll find that Evening surpasses Gatsby in terms of eroticism, however. Minot's sex scenes are dense and extended, and the earth moves for Ann even more than it did for nurse Barkley in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Yet no child happening upon Minot's sex scenes would have a clue about what was going on. For example, "There was nothing to seal off the world. The black sky did not cover them, it was the opposite of a covering, it drew them up. The sky was an example of how far distance could go. I go on forever, it said, nothing can be contained."

I recently spoke with Susan Minot about her work, but we concentrated on Thanatos, not Eros. Hell, I didn't even kiss her -- and I was going to when we first met. Wait. I don't mean that the way it sounded. Minot and I rendezvous as strangers at a Greenwich Village French restaurant (her choice!). I recognize her from her photo. She's never seen me before in her life. Yet she leans toward my face as if she expects one of those Euro-peck greetings. I know Minot has spent time in Italy writing the script to Bernardo Bertolucci's movie, "Stealing Beauty," so I lean toward her as well -- only realizing at the last moment that not even the French buss when they meet as strangers. I whip my head back. Minot appears to miss this awkward gesture. At our table I rub my sweaty hands on my pants and get her talking about Evening. She reveals she took five years to write it. "I started the novel in '92," she tells me. "And I was very much in the note stage. When I started work on the Bertolucci movie I was still trying to keep the novel going, but I was taken away from it when I was working on the set. When the film was over, I thought, If I don't get back to this and grab it, it's going to melt. So for the last year and a half I left New York and lived in different places, staying in friends' summer homes in the winter, just to really concentrate on the book and get it done fast." She smiles at the word "fast," adding, "A year and a half later." How did Minot keep track of alternating between Ann's deathbed and her memories of the wedding party? Did she map the scenes out? She nods. "There was a general structure to the book that was mapped out, but really only after half of it had been written. That's when I then tried to organize the plot a bit. It's really the backstory of the wedding, those three or four days that give the book its structure. Then the going back and forth became an intuitive thing with each draft."

 Knopf Publishing Group 0-375-40037-0 / 9780375400377
Hardcover AS NEW CONDITION New York 

Price: 19.31 USD