Starting Out in the Evening

Starting Out in the Evening
by Brian Morton

Starting Out in the Evening
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Book Summary Information

Author: Brian Morton
Edition: Paperback
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2007-10-01
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Harvest Books

Book Reviews of Starting Out in the Evening

Book Review: Very Insightful
Summary: 5 Stars

Brian Morton's books are always about personal relationships. He seems to be very good at expressing human feelings at different stages of life. His books speak from life experience and as I read them it brings back memories of how I have felt as I have grown older. I have enjoyed his other books, but this is my favorite book of his.

Summary of Starting Out in the Evening

Leonard Schiller is a novelist in his seventies, a second-string but respectable talent who produced only a small handful of books. Heather Wolfe is an attractive graduate student in her twenties. She read Schiller?s novels when she was growing up and they changed her life. When the ambitious Heather decides to write her master?s thesis about Schiller?s work and sets out to meet him?convinced she can bring Schiller back into the literary world?s spotlight?the unexpected consequences of their meeting alter everything in Schiller?s ordered life. What follows is a quasi-romantic friendship and intellectual engagement that investigates the meaning of art, fame, and personal connection. "Nothing less than a triumph" (The New York Times Book Review), Starting Out in the Evening is Brian Morton?s most widely acclaimed novel to date.





Brian Morton's Starting Out in the Evening is a study in the danger of expectations. Heather Wolfe, a pretty, brash graduate student, is confident that her thesis on the novelist Leonard Schiller will put her on the literary fast track. Yet her first meeting with her idol produces something of a shock: "He came toward her smiling. Old, fat, bald, leaning awkwardly on a cane. The man of her dreams." Can this elderly author and "man of routines" really be the looming figure whose early fictions changed her life? The more she comes to know Schiller, the more he confounds her: his willingness to toil in obscurity falls far short of Heather's romanticized ideal. She can't even quite decide "if he was a hero or if he had wasted his life."

Schiller, however, views his own life quite differently. At first he's seduced by Heather's flattering attentions, and succumbs to at least a frisson of desire for love and fame. Yet ultimately this thoughtful, dignified man wants only to finish what he has begun. He has "no illusions about the scale of his achievement, but he had tried, through art, to bring a little more beauty, a little more tolerance, a little more coherence into the world." With wise and compassionate prose, Morton examines the intersection of these two lives, intertwining their story with a third one--that of Ariel, Schiller's unhappy 40-year-old daughter. Along the way, the author quietly raises a number of questions about the utility of art, its power to inflect our dreams, and, finally, what makes a life well lived. It is to Morton's credit that he doesn't presume to answer such questions. Yet the skill with which he asks them makes Starting Out in the Evening an elegiac and deeply affecting novel. --Marianne Painter

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