Pick Up Starting Out In The Evening Illustrated By Brian Morton Available As Online Book

the book! See the movie!

Brian was my don at Sarah Lawrence, and this is quite possibly his best book, It's between this and "Breakable You", his latest, IMHO, I would think this novel was amazing even if I didn't know him, This is my third time reading it, Atwhen it was first published and I first read

it, I didn't like it, I thought the characters were weird and crazy, At, when I reread it, I was floored, much better understanding the central relationship of admiring young writer and her literary hero, Perhaps I was just enamored by my teacher, heh, Now, at, I am still deeply impressed at this meditation on art, youth and age, writing, and maybe most of all what it means to truly live, This book is set in New York City and follows Leonard Schiller, ayear dedicated, but aging author with a heart condition who is trying to finish what he thinks will be his last book.
The other main characters are Ariel, Schiller's nearlyyear old daughter, who desperately wants to have a baby so she is looking for the perfect man, Surprisingly, she has never read one of her father's book, On the other hand, the last main character is Heather Wolfe, ayear old graduate student who has read Schiller's first two books and loved them, They had a great impact on her life, She decides that she is going to write her dissertation about Schiller and hopefully turn it into a book,
Each character goes through their days trying to face their challenges and hopes the best they can looking for support and love from the people that mean the most to them.

This book has been hard to review, There is a lot that happens, yet, not much happens, I do think the point of the book comes at the last page:

"The night was warm and the sky was thick with, Ariel was eager to see the cometto see it delicately stepping across the sky, trailing it long blue train, But as she waited, holding her lover's hand, she found herself thinking that she wouldn't mind if it never even appeared: the night was astonishing already, just as it was.
"

Be thankful for today, Yes, you can continue to plan and work on your hopes and dreams, but don't forget to appreciate today for the gift and joy it is, As a writer, Morton has a lot of good and useful things to say about the "craft" of writing, so called, particularly where he characterizes it less as the glamorous or noble calling that it is made out to be and more as the bizarre compulsion it actually is.


As a writer, he has a certain amount in common with the protaganist of this book, Leonard Schiller, Where Schiller is tiring and pedantic, so is Morton, Often the narrative seems to lurch forward rather than flow, braked repeatedly by sentences that all have the ring of summary conclusions,

Morton should have also taken to heart the observation which Schiller makes of the "black and brown" people surrounding him on the subway, ie that he couldn't imagine anything of their lives and couldn't write about them.
The scenes Morton sketches between the novel's black character Casey Davis and his son were so contrived and painful that I had to skip over them completely,

But having said that, I also found it heartening that this book was successful on the market despite the abovementioned flaws and its surfeit of unappetizing detail.
This really may be due to the fact that Morton was unsparingly honest about his own motivation to write that is what finally shines through, Brian Morton's book is a gem, The characters, though flawed, are well drawn, Ariel was the exception. She seemed a bit of a loopy stereotype, Most of the action of this book takes place on the human interior, a place Morton has clearly explored, since the reflections are deadon, He raises questions about art and life and what gives meaning to both, And he offers an array of answers, always with compassion, Morton's writing never gets in the way of his ideas, but it can be memorable, too, There also is a story, and it's not bad, The events kept my interest and moved along at a comfortable pace, One thing I didn't like about the novel is that occasionally the shift to a different character felt abrupt, I'll probably come back to this one, It seems to me readers either love this or hate it either they get it or they don't,

I'm a member of the first group,

Leonard Schiller is a lonely, aging novelist whose best days are behind himboth physically and certainly with his literary venturesbut he's still sharp, A woman young enough to be his granddaughter comes into his life to write her college thesis about his works, and it reignites his enthusiasm for life, They bond in ways that could be considered taboo, but I found their relationship enthralling, We follow him on his journey to personal discovery and to find meaningand the people closest to him, That's the plot.

The use of the language is beautiful, And while I admit there's not much to the plot, I saw Leonard vividly and was thoroughly invested in him, Certainly a test is if I was disappointed to have the novel come to an end, which I was, This was a complete gem, a wonderful story, I need more stories like this in my life,.on the blog.

RTC

This will definitely be a reread for me in the future! The nutshell: An enthusiastic grad student Heather chooses to write her thesis on an aging author Schiller whose books have gone largely unrecognized.
They strike up a tenuous and tender sort of friendship, at times almost romantic and at others far from it, Schiller's daughter, Ariel, is a focal point as well, with her childlike relationship with her father and her efforts to balance finding a partner she can potentially tolerate longterm with her desperate desire to have a child before she's too far out of her's.


Not the nutshell: I can't say enough how charmed I am by these characters, They're relatively selfawareSchiller knows when he's being a pretentious bore but just can't help himself Heather sees her own unkindness in the way her interest shifts so quickly from Schiller to Sandra but her ambition and enthusiasm keep her moving anyway.
These characters are complicated, and their relationships with each other are complicated, Their interactions are messy and awkward and they struggleand mostly failto say exactly what they mean exactly when they mean it, And I pretty much love them for it,

For all the fumbly awkwardness between the characters, the prose is remarkably smooth and lovely, Some bits of it struck me as beautifully worded physical observations, others as striking truths, and still others as sentences or phrases or paragraphs that couldn't be passed by without first being read aloud.
Good fun.

The only thing here that I feel lukewarm about is the Ariel/Casey dynamic near the end, Don't get me wrong, they're great together and quirky enough to be tons of fun to read, but the baby question is so crucial to Ariel's vision of herself and her future that it bothers me a bit to leave it up in the air at the end.
I think Casey might be warming to the idea, although I don't think he ever indicates this specifically although his devotion to Ariel does kick up a notch in the lastpages or so, and I think at one point he intimates that he would do just about anything for her but then the closing lines make me think that Ariel is learning to live with his refusal.
Maybe I'm reading too much into both sides of this equation, but with all the other ends left varying degrees of open at the end, this particular one felt too unresolved for me.


Quotes, because quotes are awesome:
"Everything else passes away that which you love remains, She had to believe this, even if she wasn't sure it was true, "

"He was a writer, He knew that he'd keep going even if he were sure that nothing he wrote would ever be published again, He couldn't understand the world, couldn't live, without putting stories on paper, "

"It was nine o'clock on a Saturday, She felt as if it were about three o'clock in the morning, and it certainly didn't feel like a Saturday, It felt like a day they didn't have a name for, "

"His kisses were too rote they were assemblyline kisses, She wanted complex kisses she wanted each kiss to be a conversation, "

Bonus quote that wins the Solid Advice award for the week:
"Don't make jokes that require research, "

Different kind of nutshell: Quiet and sweetly complex story, lovely prose, great characters, Read it.
I read Brian Mortons novel, Florence Gordon, and enjoyed it so much I went in search of another, Morton writes compelling prose and he is a master of character development, Starting Out in the Evening focuses on three characters at pivotal points in their lives: seventyone yearold Leonard Schillera widowed writer who is overweight and suffering from a heart condition, his thirtynine yearold daughter, Ariela dancer with a free spirit, and Heather Wolfeayearold graduate student who is obsessed with Schiller and is determined to write her thesis on his novels.
This is a book about living and aging, about creativity finding your calling maybe more aptlyyour labor of love and being authentic and true to yourself, about loving others but appreciating your own integrity.
It is also about our human need to be recognized and seen, and to create and leave something of ourselves for posterity, Beyond the synopsis: Falling in love with ones art is as much of a commitment as giving part of yourself to another human, For the protagonist, novelist and teacher Leonard Schiller, that commitment to his art meant forgoing life much outside of his apartment, Schillers life is orbited closely by the novels hero, who in my opinion is his daughter, Ariel, who says yes to life in all its messiness, She is vulnerable and brave in ways that her father perhaps once was but lost when tragedy came, The flyby of of the graduate student Heather creates the singular tension that impossible desire and ambition create in people who share so much in common but are separated in this case by a wide gulf of time and energy.
Morton captures his characters well, each in their distinctive voice and uniform, and especially the New York they inhabit, Mortons dark palette leans more toward chiaroscuro than monochrome, his language deft in coloring the literary life of Leonard and Heather, and the wider world of Ariel and her Casey.
A touching story of an aging author Leonard Schiller and the young graduate student, Heather Wolfe, who chooses to write her thesis about Schiller's works, Heather is drawn to Schiller based on her association with the characters and themes of his first two books however, as their relationship develops, Heather is perplexed by how seeminlgy different Leonard's ordinary life is from his characters.
As the story develops, Leonard is faced with feelings of infatuation with a much younger woman while Heather has to decide how to critique her subject's work,

There were several passages that stood out for me while reading "Starting Out in the Evening":

“You seize your freedom in a spirit of rebelliousness, exuberance, defiant joy.
But to live that choice over the weeks and months and years to come requires different qualities, It requires that you turn hard, turn rigid, Because it isnt a choice that the world encourages, you have to wear a suit of armor to defend it, ”

“The moments of beauty, the moments when you feel blessed, are only moments but memory and imagination, treasuring them, can string them together like the delicate glories on the necklace her father had given her.
Everything else passes away that which you love remains, ”

“Thats how I feel now, About myself. I dont feel like an old man, I feel as if Im still ripening, I feel as if Im just starting to understand things, But whats the use of this ripeness It doesnt give birth to anything, It doesnt nourish anything. It just disappears. ”.