Stewart O'Nan is one of my favorite contemporary American authors. His genius is in how he illuminates ordinary lives, revealing the humanity, along with the wonder, of everyday life. I also love how he uses small, telling details to bring his characters and their stories to life.

Emily Maxwell is an 80 year old widow, living alone in the house she had shared with her husband and their two children in Pittsburgh. Her days follow a regular routine, and her most faithful companion, besides Rufus her dog (a wonderful character in his own right), is her sister-in-law, Arlene. The reader follows Emily over the course of several months as she contemplates her own mortality, her relationship with her children, her loneliness, and her regrets. It's a very quiet novel - nothing much happens - but Emily is a brilliant, fully realized character who felt incredibly real to me. How O'Nan managed to turn this story into a compelling page-turner is a mystery to me, but he did it.

5 stars

"She would be judged by how she'd lived her life, not how she wished it had been. She accepted that completely. She was painfully aware of her failings. Every Sunday she confessed them, and while by no means clear, her conscience was no heavier than most, or so she hoped."

NB: O'Nan's earlier novel, Wish You Were Here, introduces Emily and her family, shortly after she is widowed. It's a very good book, but Emily, Alone can stand on its own. And there is a related noved, Henry, Himself about Emily's husband. I haven't read that one yet, but I'm looking forward to it. ( )

A lovely, quiet novel of manners. ( )

Over the course of a few long winter months in Pittsburgh, Emily Maxwell moves through her days with her old dog, Rufus, and her sister in law Arlene for company, missing her late husband Henry and her best friend Louise, and wishing for closer connections with her children and grandchildren.

Slow-paced and character-driven with a strong Pitt setting.

See also: Life After Life by Jill McCorkle

Quotes

What a luxury it was to have someone who listened instead of contesting every point. (61)

She'd watched her own children grow up, maybe that was enough - as if one were allowed to see only so much of life, the future, like the past, necessarily hidden and mysterious. (90)

Room by room, she cleaned and rearranged and straightened, and in a few hours changed everything back to exactly how it had been before, wiping away any trace of disorder, as if they'd never been there. (116)

Waiting and illness were both a kind of limbo. (119)

How powerful the romance of the past was, and how sad, all the lost possibilities, despite how well things had turned out. (134)

Like the death of anyone in their circle, it brought Emily closer to her own, as if they'd all moved up in line. (148)

That was how time passed - waiting through everything else to do the thing you wanted. (163)

Perhaps it was nostalgia, or just the stubbornness of memory, but she could never separate the grown-up versions of her children from the children they'd been. (176)

It wasn't giving up when there was nothing left anyway. (191)

She was done storing things in the hope that someone would love them as much as she did. (212)

...as if, just by being mothers and daughters, they were all caught in something larger, something ultimately not their fault. (221)

Why did she always want more, when this was all there was? (247) ( )

How could I not love a book whose dedication reads: "For my mother, who took me to the bookmobile"? I found title character Emily to be slightly tedious company at times, but she was tedious in a very believable, human, and mostly harmless way. As a whole, Emily, Alone is a lovely little meditation on aging and life and how, although we all grow old, there are ways in which we never really grow up. I love the Virginia Woolf quote that O'Nan opens with, as well as the dedication, and it sums up the book quite nicely: "Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life--startling, unexpected, unknown?" Yes, it could. ( )

Although Stewart O’Nan is a man, and not nearly 80, he has given us a marvelous in-depth portrayal of Emily Maxwell, an 80-year old widow living in Pittsburgh.

This is a character-driven novel with no real plot or action, but it is far from dull, and in fact just the opposite. I was eager to watch Emily go about her daily life, interacting with her children, sister in-law, cleaning lady and neighbors, filling her days with museum visits, garden shows, the Eat-In-Park, funerals and preparations for family visits. Emily is a totally three-dimensional character whom we can relate to even if we aren’t 80; her doubts about being a good mother and daughter, her longings for Spring, her bafflement about her political party’s wanderings, her resentment at not receiving Thank you notes from her grandchildren, and her worries about her aging dog, Rufus.

O’Nan has an eye for detail and an ear for conversation. All of his descriptions and dialog ring true. There was only one little thing that would have tipped me off that he was a male writer (had I not already known)and that was when Emily picked up her sister in-laws cosmetic bag to take to her in the hospital and called it a dopp kit. I have never heard any woman call her own or another woman’s cosmetic/toiletry bag a dopp kit. Women use the name dopp kit in reference to men’s toiletry bags, and men use that term for their own or another man’s toiletry bag-even Wikipedia says it is a man’s toiletry bag. Other than this minor little detail the rest of the details seemed flawless.

I love good character driven novels such as Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge (which I thought of often while I read this), and to my delight this book rates right up there with that classic.
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