‘Evensong’ offers a lesson in how to live long and well

Stewart O’Nan’s novel revisits his character Emily Maxwell and her aging friends.

By Ron Charles

A quarter of a century ago, when Stewart O’Nan first started writing about old Emily Maxwell, I couldn’t be bothered to turn down the radio. But over the years, I’ve come to cherish his tender care for the Maxwells, and now, with the release of “Evensong,” his fourth novel involving Emily, I’m thinking, “Who you calling old?”

O’Nan, for all his brilliant writing about the repercussions of crime, disappearance and war, also sometimes operates in a separate register where he has quietly become America’s patron saint of everyday life. In some of his novels, like “Last Night at the Lobster,” a story about the closing of a seafood restaurant, the plot is so pedestrian, so allergic to excitement that the book sounds like O’Nan accepted an impossible challenge from Satan in MFA hell. The fact that it’s moving and memorable is nothing short of miraculous.

But the four stand-alone novels that include Emily demonstrate most dramatically O’Nan’s commitment to the undramatic. He’s determined to fix our gaze on people we’re stridently incurious about, even as time’s winged chariot drags us into their potpourri-scented realm. And what’s more, his elderly women aren’t doling out hard-won wisdom, flirting scandalously with young bucks or solving weekly murders from a corner table in the local diner. They’re just ferrying leftovers to friends and keeping greeting card companies alive. In one chapter, someone can’t find good nutmeg. In another, a woman delivers “a bale of off-brand incontinence pads.” Their lives are organized around the calendar of their church and its music, which is not always up to their standards, but of course one should keep such criticism to oneself. Read the full review at the Washington Post.