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Emily, Alone Review: The New York Times (electronic format)

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The New York Times Book Review’s review of Emily, Alone is now available on their website.

Stewart O’Nan Tells a Widow’s Tale

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.”

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More Emily, Alone Reviews

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Huffington Post

Surrounded by Life

Emily, Alone, by Stewart O’Nan, is a book of quiet yet stunning beauty; steady and trim from the outside, like its protagonist, and, just like her, stirring inside with deep longings, intense observations, and a strong attachment to living. Emily is of the age she claims she never wanted to reach, the very last of her neighborhood’s country club gang of mothers, and living far from her children and grandchildren, who call frequently but not enough, and visit even less often. Emily is tethered to life seemingly only through ties to her sister-in-law Arlene, her own aging dog, and her deep love for her adopted hometown of Pittsburgh. But O’Nan will surprise us, uncovering within his character a capacity for finding so much still to live for — so many ties holding her to people and to places — and providing a reminder to us all of life’s capacity to excite and invigorate, at any age.

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The Caregiver’s Bookshelf (New York Times Blog)

How She Carries On

So often, novels and movies with elderly protagonists take pains to depict them in a state of rebellion. They’re breaking out of an assisted living facility. They’re skydiving and climbing the pyramids, pursuing their bucket lists. They’re heading into space for one last, crucial mission.

They’re behaving, in other words, as if they weren’t old. The preferred word for this state, I believe, is “feisty.”

I cherish the newly published novel “Emily, Alone,” by Stewart O’Nan, because the main character doesn’t deny or resist her age.

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Emily, Alone Review: Fresh Air on NPR

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The Joy Of The Mundane In ‘Emily, Alone’
by Maureen Corrigan

It takes a deft hand to do justice to the ordinary. Most novelists don’t even bother to try, which is why most novels are about a rip in the fabric of the routine. It’s tough to find fiction ambitious enough to tackle the story of a run-of-the-mill job, a hum-drum family; but, if the mundane matters to you, then Stewart O’Nan is your man.

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More Reviews of Emily, Alone

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Four more recent reviews of Emily, Alone.

Boston Globe

Drama is in the details

A gentle portrait of a woman in her twilight years — her small everyday victories and setbacks — turns an ordinary life into the extraordinary

What a relief: No vampires, zombies, fashionistas, shopaholics; no child abuse, alternate universes, cyber anything; and no violent crime (only a scratched car door) mark Stewart O’Nan’s lovely, lyrical, leisurely paced portrait of 80-year-old Emily Maxwell. A sequel to O’Nan’s “Wish You Were Here’’ (in which the Maxwell family spends one last week at their soon-to-be-sold summer house), this poignant novel — his 13th — stands on its own. Though, at first, Emily’s world seems measured out in coffee spoons, the quotidian details supply their own drama and beauty, underscoring the small triumphs and losses of daily life: a meal with a discount coupon, a garden, the companionship of an old dog, the comfort of music, a Mother’s Day phone call, a parking space, a cold caught from a grandchild, the noisy construction across the street, a neighbor naked in the moonlight, a friend’s new eyeglasses.

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The Star Tribune

Shouldering on

A woman faces her twilight years alone, but with interest and curiosity.

That’s the book’s goal: To show life’s persistence without the grim fatalism or spry attitude that define so many fictional portraits of the aged. O’Nan’s episodic chapters inhabit Emily’s thoughts on a host of quotidian things: thank-you notes, housekeeping, driving, watching television, listening to the radio. But O’Nan gives each small experience an emotional heft, and he’s supremely skilled at revealing Emily’s emotional investment in every small change in her life. When her dog has to make a trip to the vet, it’s enormous, and when she catches a cold it’s as much opportunity as illness — a chance to interact with others anew. “Being sick,” O’Nan points out, “was news.”

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The Washington Post

‘Emily: Alone’: Stewart O’Nan writes on aging gracefully

“Emily, Alone” is a sequel to “Wish You Were Here” (2002), O’Nan’s long, multi-faceted story about a family’s last summer vacation in Chautauqua, N.Y. It’s tempting to assume that this new novel, at half the first one’s length and with its narrow, sclerotic plot, is just a death rattle from the original story, but in fact it’s better. Shorter, wittier, much more tightly focused, “Emily, Alone” makes the perfect demonstration of O’Nan’s humanizing vision. Yes, there’s always the danger that he’s writing what Frank Norris once disparaged as “the drama of the broken tea cup.” But what saves him is his profound respect for Emily, the hopes and fears that lie beyond her old-lady foibles and fussiness, which, even if you aren’t an old lady and never will be, turn out to be the same hopes and fears we all harbor alone.

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Cleveland Plain-Dealer

Stewart O’Nan finds ‘Emily, Alone’ aging heroically

Reading “Emily, Alone” made me think of Charles Dickens. This is somewhat incongruous, because Stewart O’Nan’s novels are not crafted out of the complicated, multilayered plots that we associate with Dickens. But O’Nan does share a laserlike observational talent with the Victorian master — one that can shock the reader into a sense that the story is lifted out of one’s own family or even oneself.

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