Evensong: A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A penetrating and powerful novel about the deep undercurrents of love and regret in one Midwestern family.
In 1939, Maggie Doud married Garfield Maguire. Now, fifty years on, she’s Margaret Maguire: a widow and a grandmother, unable to ignore the consequences of having married a cruel and arrogant man. Her daughters are strangers to each other, past hope of reconciling. Margaret’s granddaughter could be the one to break the cycle, but she can’t do it alone. Beautifully rendered and poignantly told, Evensong masterfully explores a woman’s desire for redemption and understanding at the end of her days.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I had waited years to be married, and now here I was again, waiting for Gar to come home." So thought Margaret during World War II, after her husband, Garfield, enlisted and she was home with her young daughter, Joanne, living with her exasperating mother-in-law and waiting. Such is one of the many quiet moments on which Margaret, now at the end of her life, reflects. Southwood's (Falling to Earth) novel opens with a brief, delightful glimpse back to her wedding night "we heard his mother clattering dishes in the sink, all the dinner dishes she had saved for this moment" and then abruptly moves on to the hospital bed where she has woken up, bewildered, with an adult Joanne at her bedside. Despite the warmth and intimacy of the dinner dishes and many other finely wrought flashes of the past, the novel's pacing never quite catches, instead feeling confusing and even dull. Alternating back and forth in time, the narrative organization seemingly echoes that of one's mind late in life, coming and going out of the present, memories more clear and logical than the current circumstances. Despite the integrity of this intention, there's never anything else but quiet. Names and regrets pile up; all the ordinary makings of a life that leave the reader, much like Margaret herself, waiting for something to begin or add up.
