Book Review: Emily, Alone by Stewart O'Nan

I think Stewart O'Nan must reinvent himself more than any other modern US author. Many, if not most, writers give a case and they get pretty closely within a certain range. Philip Roth likes to write near the lives of Jewish upper middle class men. Jodi Picoult picks an "emergence" and so uses multiple narrators to write about it. William Faulkner liked to chronicle lives in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

Flannery O'Connor was one at finding the gothic in the quotidian. You can be certain that characters in Barbara Kingsolver's fiction will advocate for social justice. With Stewart O'Nan, however, you get a different book every time he's at bat. In A Prayer for the Dying, set in post-Civil War Wisconsin, he pulls off a beautifully, if tragically, conceived novel in what may be the only successful use of a second-person narrative I've ever read. In Everyday People, he narrates vignettes from several African-American perspectives from the inner city neighborhood of East Liberty, PA. The Circus Fire is a narrative nonfiction piece about one of the worse tragedies in Hartford, Connecticut's history. In Songs for the Missing, he explores the psychological ramifications that a missing girl has on her home and in her small town at large. So I wasn't sure what to ask when I picked up his new novel, Emily, Alone, forthcoming from Viking in March 2011, but I knew it would be worth my time. It turns out to be the history of Emily Maxwell, a woman of a certain age, who muses alternately on her loneliness and her newfound independence in widowhood. (What I did not live until after finishing the word is that it is likewise a continuation to O'Nan's previous novel, Wish You Were Here. I had no idea when I picked up the further reading copy that it was the case, so I can tell you with impunity that it's not essential to read WYWH before reading E, A. There aren't enough pieces of good fiction being written about older generations (2009's The Leisure Seeker, while dealing with a couple of octogenarians, was not especially well written) and Emily, Alone goes a long way to take that gap. It is thoughtfully done, getting into the mind, heart, and retention of an older woman in a thoroughly convincing way, evoking her loneliness poignantly but without resorting to emotional manipulation or sentimentality: it's only a mere fact that once you contact a certain age, you must confront the theory of outliving your set of friends. But there are warm moments, too. Emily learns to drive again, trading in her husband's behemoth of a gas guzzler in favour of a Prius, so that she might zip about town, visiting the art museum and planetarium on their senior discount days with her sister-in-law, Arlene. She has ongoing conversations with her dog, who is too old and grey and wide of sleep. She muses on the changing demographics of her once upper middle class neighborhood and of Pittsburgh in general. In short, she tries to be a good life, consciously reaching beyond her loneliness to add both import and construction to her days. O'Nan is one of the most versatile storytellers I know, and this book further clinches his home in the new American pantheon of writers. NB: My sales rep, Karl Krueger from Penguin, gave me an advance reading of this word a few months ago and I finally got round to reading it. I'm hoping that we'll be capable to schedule another author reading with Mr. O'Nan at the Odyssey in the spring!