Friday Feature: Stewart O’Nan Tells a Widow’s Tale

--by JOANNA SMITH RAKOFF (New York Times, April 1, 2011)

Who is Stewart O’Nan? Over the past 17 years, he’s written 11 novels — we’ll turn to the 12th in a moment — as remarkable for their precise, economical language and depth of characterization as for the fact that each is as different from its predecessor, in style, tone and narrative approach, as if it had come from a different author.

What unites these disparate books are their themes — the fragmented and solitary nature of contemporary American life, the degradation of Rust Belt cities and towns, the slippery line between the working and middle class — and a distinct ability to turn toward the dark places from which other writers might avert their gaze. This is, perhaps, a fancy way of saying that O’Nan often veers into the bloody territory traditionally ascribed to genre fiction (thrillers, mysteries, horror, even procedurals), revolving around murders, abductions, mysterious plagues or gruesome accidental deaths, with forays into the supernatural, as in The Night Country, narrated by three teenagers killed in a car crash. This is a writer who, like Dickens, you can count on to kill off the little girl — a writer who looks at cars warming in suburban driveways and sees “enough white smoke for a million suicides.”

So it’s funny, and unexpected, that O’Nan’s most terrifying novel, Wish You Were Here (2002), relegated such violence to the sidelines, centering instead on the familiar psychological torture a family wreaks upon itself. Sprawling and virtuosic, that novel follows Emily Maxwell (70-ish and newly widowed) and her family over a final week at their Chautauqua lake house, which Emily has decided to sell despite the family’s objections, turning the gathering into “politics on a dangerously heartfelt level, where the smallest disagreement could be taken as a betrayal.”

Now Emily has returned. Set seven years later, in 2007, Emily, Alone — O’Nan’s best novel yet — finds his difficult heroine rattling around her Pittsburgh house, “her life no longer an urgent or necessary business,” redistributing Kleenex boxes (the fullest on her nightstand, the least full in the office), cleaning her stove in preparation for the cleaning lady’s arrival, noting “the usual troop of jays and nuthatches and titmice in her bird journal,” scanning the obituaries for familiar names and, mostly, planning for the annual visits of her children, Margaret and Kenneth.

So quiet and orderly is Emily’s life that a phone call followed by a ringing doorbell constitutes a “madhouse,” a walk in the snow “an adventure” and the purchase of a new car a life-changing event. The novel, in a way, hinges on that car — a bright blue Subaru Outback that she (hilariously) worries is too flashy — which, both literally and metaphorically, allows her greater agency over her own life and, in the months that follow, sends her into something of an emotional tailspin. Suddenly, she finds herself open to the world anew, no longer derisive of her neighbors’ garish Christmas decorations but “grateful for the sheer silly exuberance,” and increasingly aware of both her culpability in her children’s struggles and her own shortcomings, her restless desire for something larger, for perfection, for the impossible fulfillment of her ideals. “Why did she always want more,” she asks herself, “when this was all there was?”

Emily’s frenetic activity and endless lists are, of course, a way of fending off such questions, as well as the overwhelming surges of memory that serve only to further her constant sense of loss. “She could not stop these visitations, even if she wanted to,” she laments. “They plagued her like migraines, left her helpless and dissatisfied, as if her life and the lives of all those she’d loved had come to nothing, merely because that time was gone, receding even in her own memory, to be replaced by this diminished present.”

It’s heartbreaking stuff — I will confess that I found myself sobbing at certain, often unexpected, points, as when Emily donates a set of monogrammed luggage, feeling like “an executioner” — and yet the novel’s brilliance lies just as much in O’Nan’s innate comic timing, which often stems from Emily’s self-imposed isolation from, and disgust with, the modern world. At a Van Gogh exhibit, she thinks the people listening to the audio tour look like “the subjects of some mind-control experiment, pressing buttons on a small black box wired to their heads.” Underlying the humor is an incisive investigation of the ways cultural forces shape private lives: the constant clash between Emily and her children has as much to do with generational differences as with questions of temperament and personal inclination. A child of the Depression and the Great War, raised in privation, Emily prizes thrift and industry. Her children — products of the 1960s and, of course, their parents’ financial stability — prize self-expression over all.

If O’Nan’s earlier novels were influenced by Poe, the spectre of Henry James hovers delicately above Emily’s Grafton Street home, insinuating itself into O’Nan’s spiraling, exact sentences and the beautiful, subtle symbolism that permeates the novel. James, of course, wrote ghost stories, too, and viewed the supernatural forces at play in stories like “The Turn of the Screw” as an embodiment of the anxiety that underlies the stuff of daily life, “the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.” If O’Nan makes one thing clear in “Emily, Alone,” it’s that these days the normal — for an 80-year-old woman living alone, far from her children — might be just as sinister as it is easy.

[Joanna Smith Rakoff is the author of the novel A Fortunate Age; a version of this review appeared in print on April 3, 2011, on page BR9 of the New York Times Sunday Book Review]