Review by Booklist Review
Walking the dog, playing cards, trying to fill too many rainy days--it seems like any other summer vacation at the Maxwell family cottage in Chautauqua, except that since widowed matriarch Emily has sold the place, this summer could be the last. The week is bittersweet, and not just for Emily, who is caught between the memories of her long marriage with Henry and the need to move on. Her son, Ken, still trying to find himself at age 40, and his wife, Lisa; daughter, Meg, in the midst of a bitter divorce; Ken and Lisa's kids, Ella and Sam; Meg's kids, Sarah and Justin; and Henry's sister, Arlene, all bring their own baggage of insecurity, disappointment, and frustration, as well as, for some of them, regret that the cottage (and the past) are slipping away. Taking us inside everyone, from sixtyish women to 10-year-old boys, O'Nan gets all the details right--the irritations that arise from too much forced intimacy, the clutter and cast-offs that accumulate in a summerhouse that has been in the same family for years, the worn and slightly tacky ambience of an old resort, the tedium of days with nothing important to do. Although it's a long week and this is a long book, readers will find themselves fully engaged by each character's particular dilemmas and dreams. --Mary Ellen Quinn
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
O'Nan relies on a patient accumulation of detail instead of a focused dramatic arc to achieve a Vermeer-like realism in his latest novel. His strategy is to record minutely the thoughts and actions of all nine members of the extended Maxwell family as they spend a week at their family summer house, until their smallest gestures become familiar to the reader. Now that her husband, Henry, is dead, Emily Maxwell, the matriarch of the clan, is selling the family retreat near Chautauqua, N.Y. Emily and her sister-in-law, Arlene, drive up together from Pittsburgh for a last summer visit; Emily's son, Ken, and his wife, Lise, come next with their two children; and finally Emily's daughter, Meg, and Meg's son and daughter arrive. For seven days the Maxwells interact, with Emily's disappointment in her children prompting them to assess their lives themselves. Meg, a recovering alcoholic, is in the middle of a divorce. Kenneth is a failed photographer, whose latest low-paying job is in a photo lab. Lise, his wife, dislikes Emily, and is jealous of Ken and Meg's closeness. The children, whose tensions are wholly other than those of the adults, are tracked just as closely, with O'Nan's account of Ken's 13-year-old daughter Ella's budding crush on her cousin Sarah, also 13, becoming one of the high points of the novel. Various subplots evolve, especially one concerning a kidnapped local store clerk. At times the story is smothered by its own accumulative logic; yet in clinging so relentlessly to the surface of his world, O'Nan slowly pulls the reader into it. Agent, David Gernert, the Gernert Company. 9-city author tour. (May) Forecast: O'Nan refuses to be pigeonholed this slice-of-middle-class-life novel follows the nonfiction Circus Fire and the inner-city novel Everyday People. The appealing ordinariness of its subject should make it one of his more accessible and better-selling books. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
O'Nan's seventh novel portrays the attempt of a dysfunctional American family to deal with grief. Following the death of her husband, controlling and hypercritical matriarch Emily Maxwell assembles surviving family members at her summer home on Lake Chautauqua in New York for one final vacation before selling the place. In eight long sections devoted to successive days of the week, O'Nan observes family dynamics from each character's point of view. Son Kenneth has lost his teaching job at MIT and is now working for minimum wage at a photo lab. Daughter Margaret is fresh out of rehab and finalizing her divorce. Sister-in-law Arlene, who never married, resents being left out of family decisions. The four grandchildren are bored silly. The obvious similarities to Jonathan Franzen's bestselling family saga, The Corrections, are probably unintentional but impossible to ignore. One big difference is that Franzen's novel follows a traditional dramatic arc culminating in the resolution of its characters' problems, whereas O'Nan's is all loose ends. After 500 pages of worry and speculation, virtually nothing has been decided. A well-written but ultimately unsatisfying book that is arguably O'Nan's least successful to date. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/02.] Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
O'Nan's exceedingly low-key seventh novel (after Everyday People, 2001, etc.) depicts a family's final week in the summer cottage its widowed matriarch has just sold. Following husband Henry's death, Emily Maxwell doesn't feel up to the demands of owning a vacation home on New York's Lake Chautauqua while living in Pittsburgh, especially since neither son Ken nor daughter Meg is in any position to help. Ken is trying without much conviction to find himself as a photographer, though both he and wife Lise suspect he has no great talent. Meg's husband left her a year ago shortly after she completed rehab; she's not drinking but still smokes pot and is as angry as ever. Unsurprisingly, Meg's ten-year-old son Justin worries about everything, while teenaged daughter Sarah simply stonewalls her. Ken's daughter Ella spends the week trying to hide her lesbian crush on pretty, sexy Sarah, while son Sam steals items he hopes won't be missed. Henry's sister Arlene, a retired schoolteacher, observes the clan's uneasy interactions while mourning the sale of a cottage she feels is as much hers as Emily's. As always, O'Nan limns his characters with authority and empathy, doing so especially with Emily, who can't help expecting the worst in every situation and constantly makes lists of the tasks everyone else has failed to perform. The most moving passages occur during a day trip to Niagara Falls as Emily's recollections of her honeymoon there mingle with memories of Henry's death. Everyone misses Henry, portrayed by O'Nan as a quiet man who held the family together but papered over conflicts that should have been confronted. On the debit side, it's hard to take much interest in characters who all see themselves as dreadfully ordinary when their author neither counters that judgment nor makes any claims for the importance of ordinariness. Fine prose and lovely strokes of portraiture throughout, but overall a bit of a disappointment from so ambitious and gifted a writer.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
