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Summary
Summary
Every evening at five o'clock, Christina and Rudy stopped work and began the ritual commonly known as Happy Hour. Rudy mixed Christina's drink with loving precision, the cavalier slosh of Bombay Sapphire over ice shards, before settling across from her in his Stickley chair with his glass of Scotch. They shared a love of language and music (she is an author, he a composer, after all), a delight in intense conversation, a fascination with popes, and nearly thirty years of life together. What did I think, that we had forever'muses Christina, seven months after Rudy's unexpected death. While coming to terms with her loss, with the space that Rudy once inhabited, Christina reflects on their vibrant bond--with all its quirks, habits, and unguarded moments--as well as her passionate sorrow and her attempts to reposition herself and her new place in the very real world they shared. In this literary jewel, a bittersweet novella of absence and presence and the mysterious gap between them, Gail Godwin has performed a small miracle. In essence,Evenings at Fiveis a grief sonata for solo instrument transposed into words. Interwoven with meditations and movements, full of aching truths and a wicked sense of humor, it exquisitely captures the cyclical nature of commitment--and the eternal quality of a romance completed.
Author Notes
Gail Godwin was born on June 18, 1937, in Birmingham, Ala. and graduated from the University of North Carolina and University of Iowa. Godwin writes about strong women, a perspective she gathered from her own life. After her father abandoned her at an early age, she was raised by her mother and grandmother. Her father eventually returned on the day of her high school graduation and she lived with him for a brief period before he ultimately shot and killed himself.
Godwin worked as a reporter for The Miami Herald, and later as a travel consultant before achieving her fame as a writer. Godwin's novels are about contemporary women, frequently Southern, who search for meaning in their lives. In Glass People, the heroine is a beautiful woman who learns that her husband is merely obsessed with her beauty and unconcerned about her as a person. Other popular titles include The Odd Woman and The Good Husband. Godwin has been the recipient of several honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Celebrated novelist Godwin (Father Melancholy's Daughter) lost her companion of nearly 30 years, the composer Robert Starer, two years ago, and this book is a devoted, quirky, wry and surprisingly powerful fictionalization of aspects of their life together as working artists. It takes its text, as Godwin might like to say (her last novel was, after all, Evensong) from the cocktail hour the pair observed, well, religiously, at the end of their working day, exchanging their jokes, their thoughts, their sense of themselves and their friends and neighbors. It swiftly and seamlessly moves into husband Rudy's long illness, nobly borne, and wife Christina's profound sense of loss after his death, tempered frequently by flashes of hilarity and sweet sense. The book has an elusive tone, somber but never mawkish, with a delight in words and the ways people use and abuse them that is typical of this urbane author. For a book that can be read in an hour, it is remarkably dense, and can only whet the appetite for the new novel Godwin is said to be working on. The drawings that accompany the text, as illustrations of some of Rudy and Christina's household artifacts, are clean-lined but repetitious. (Apr.) Forecast: This is an odd hybrid of a book, but it is likely to appeal to Godwin's large following, opening as it does a window on her private life; it could also be sold as a gift book. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A woman faces the void in her life and home after the death of her longtime companion. "He was a big man and he leaves a big space," writes Christina about the recently deceased Rudy, a Vienna-born composer who shared her life for 28 years. At five o'clock, when Rudy would punctually begin grinding ice and slicing lime for her gin and soda, their farmhouse in upstate New York seems especially empty. Throughout, Frances Halsband's line drawings of objects like Rudy's chair, his metronome, and "Ralph the knife" (for the limes) underscore the text's keening sense of absence as a palpable physical presence. Like Godwin (Evensong, 1990, etc.), Christina is a southern-born, divorced novelist, veteran of a teaching stint at Iowa; these similarities to her creator, along with the dedication to composer Robert Starer, Godwin's own partner, who died in 2001, suggest that this is not so much fiction as an autobiographical meditation on love and loss cast in the form the author knows best. A few carefully selected memories reveal Rudy's arrogance and frequently awful social behavior as well as his warmth and charm. Godwin's experience and skill (this is her 11th novel) show in the absence of sentimentality, the seamless shiftings of time as Christina remembers incidents from her past, and the nicely calibrated mix of tragedy and comedy. The predominant tone is certainly sad, but there's a surprising amount of humor, particularly in some very maladroit sympathy notes ("Beth is on her way to becoming an accomplished musician. Had it not been for Rudy's prompting, I might not have acted so quickly"). The story does feel rather slight, but presumably it's intended to be a personal statement, not the last word on death or loss. As Rudy once remarked about his work, "I used to try to be original. Now I try to be clear and essential." Intimate and touching, albeit not revelatory. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
She's a writer. He's a composer. Married for many years, they've forged a passionate and mutually inspiring intimacy, spending their days working at opposite ends of the house until each evening at five, when they meet for cocktails. Rudy, a witty, cosmopolitan, and outspoken man, always sits in his special chair, while Christina, this gentle but canny tale's narrator, drapes herself on the cat-ravaged black-leather couch. So begins celebrated novelist Godwin's latest work, a slim, expertly fashioned, and subtly philosophical fiction about a profound bond that commenced with a lightning-like jolt, causing the already married Rudy to abandon his family and Christina to walk away from a tenure-track teaching gig, and ended just as cataclysmically with Rudy's unexpected death. As Christina navigates an onslaught of memories and attempts to close the enormous tear in her heretofore tightly knit universe, her now solitary cocktail hour extends far into the night, but she is rescued from her wild grief by the tender intervention of friends from church, who help her regain her precious composure. As Godwin ponders the significance of private rituals, artistic commitment, a spiritual practice, and love, she accomplishes more in this smart, arch, and charming little illustrated novel than many of her peers do in far heftier volumes. Godwin has written 10 libretti for musical works by the late Robert Starer, to whom this novel is dedicated. --Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
A snippet of a story, drenched in autobiography and illustrated with cozy line drawings, comes from the well-respected popular author of Father Melancholy's Daughter and Evensong. Novelist Christina and composer Rudy had shared a life for almost 30 years before his death. They had met at Yaddo, the artist's retreat in Saratoga Springs, and threw away everything in their existing lives, except their work, to be together. The intimate details of their cocktail hour and his final years of illness, as well as Christina's new life alone, are wrenchingly portrayed. The reality of the characters is so close to the skin that this view inside their lives at a sorrowful time is almost too sad. Fans of Godwin's other fiction will be fascinated by this minor piece. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/02.]-Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Five o'clock sharp. "Ponctualité est la politesse des rois": Rudy quoting his late father, a factory owner (textiles) in Vienna before the Nazis came. The Pope's phone call, followed by the grinding of the ice, a growling, workmanlike sound, a lot like Rudy's own sound, compliments of the GE model Rudy had picked out fourteen years ago when they built this house. Gr-runnch, gr-runnch, grr-rr-runnch. ("And look! It even has this tray you pull down to mix the drinks." Rudy retained the enthusiasms of childhood.) He built Christina's drink with loving precision after the Pope's call. Rudy did the high Polish voice, overlaid with an Italian accent: "Thees is John Paul. My cheeldren, eet is cocktail time." Or sometimes Christina's study phone would not ring. Rudy simply emerged from his studio below and called brusquely up to her in his basso profundo: "Hello? The Pope just called. Are you ready for a drink?" The ominous rolled r's on the "ready" and "drink": if you're not, you'd better be. I won't be here forever, you know. The cavalier slosh of Bombay Sapphire (Rudy never measured) over the ice shards. The fssst as he loosened the seltzer cap and added the self-respecting splash that made her able to call it a gin and soda. Then, marching over to the sink: "I need Ralph." Ralph was their best serrated knife. The thinly cut slice of lime oozed fresh juice. Rudy cut well; he cut his own music paper, and he had been cutting Christina's hair exactly as she liked it for twenty-eight years. And in summer, a sprig of mint from the garden, a hairy, pungent variety given to them by the wife of a pianist who had recorded Rudy's music. Sometimes Rudy joined Christina in the gin and soda. Her financial man from Buffalo had given them two twelve-ounce tumblers with old-fashioned ticker tapes etched into the surfaces. She always kept them in the freezer, so they would frost up as soon as they hit the air. Other times Rudy would say, "I need a Scotch tonight." That went into a different glass, a lovely cordial shape etched with grapes, given to him by the daughter of a pasha who had invited him to her houseboat parties in Cairo back in '42 and called him Harpo because his assignment in the Royal Air Force had been playing piano and harp to keep up troop morale. "I need a Scotch tonight" could mean either that his work had gone extremely well or that some unwelcome aspect of reality (his music publisher sending back sloppily edited orchestra parts, being put on hold by his health insurance provider, being put on hold by anyone at all) had undermined his creative momentum. "Thees is Il Papa calling from the Vatican. Cheeldren, eet is cocktail time." Christina was a cradle Episcopalian who had gone to a Catholic school run by a French order of nuns in North Carolina. Rudy was a nonpracticing Jew who had gone to a Catholic Gymnasium in Vienna until age fourteen, when the Nazis came. Rudy always liked to tell how there were two Jews and one Protestant in his class at the Gymnasium, "and the Protestant had the worst of it by far." So Rudy and Christina shared an affectionate fascination with Popes, especially this one, with his hulking masculine shoulders before they began to stoop, and his nonstop traveling, and all the languages. What did I think, that we had forever? Christina asked herself, sipping the gin and soda she now made for herself. Often Rudy had interrupted himself in midsentence to explode at her: "You're not listening!" What was I listening to? The ups and downs of my own day's momentum. We were both "ah-tists," as the real estate lady who sold us our first house pronounced it. She herself had been married to an ah-tist. Her husband's novel had been runner-up for the Pulitzer, she told us, the year Anthony Adverse won. Her name was Odette, as in Swann's downfall. Rudy was fifty-two and I was thirty-nine and neither of us knew, until Odette carefully explained it to us, that you could buy a house without having all the money to pay for it up front. Christina would arrange herself on the black leather sofa they had splurged on in their midlife prosperity (a combined windfall of a bequest from Rudy's late uncle in Lugano, with whom Rudy had played chess, and a lucrative two-book contract for Christina, in those bygone days when there were enough competing publishers to run up the auction bid) and which the Siamese cats had ruined within six months. She would cross her ankles on the Turkish cushions on top of the burled-wood coffee table and train her myopic gaze on Rudy's long craggy face and crest of white hair floating reassuringly from his Stickley armchair on the other side of the fireplace. An editor had once told Rudy he looked like "a happy Beckett." Christina felt rich in her bounty: the workday was over and she had this powerful companion pulsing his attention at her, and her whole drink to go. They raised their cocktail glasses to each other. Excerpted from Evenings at Five by Gail Godwin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
