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Summary
Summary
Catherine and Harry are two high-powered young professionals living in Washington, D.C., and engaged to be married in a few short months. Harry works as a special adviser to the president and Catherine as a publicist for the vice president. Once happy and more-or-less carefree, Harry and Catherine now have such little time for each other that Catherine begins to worry about the future of their relationship, and she wonders what happened to the Harry she met and fell in love with in New York. But when Harry goes missing, she is left to question how much she really knows about him and what he knows of her.
Summoning deeper themes of lost innocence, human relationships, and ultimately how well we know and understand those closest to us, this elegant debut also stirs up the grit of political Washington and reads as a love letter for the romance of New York.
Author Notes
MELISSA McCONNELL grew up in Washington, D.C., and is a former publicist for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Evidence of Love is her first novel. She lives in London.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Politics get very personal in McConnell's absorbing debut. Catherine has given up her near-idyllic existence in Manhattan to accompany her fiancE, Harry, to D.C., where he works in the West Wing as a Special Advisor to the president, while she holes up in the adjacent Old Executive Office Building as a PR factotum to the Veep. What does a special adviser do? In Harry's case, he works really long hours and then one day he disappears. In Harry's absence, Catherine longingly recalls the progress of their relationship, struggles to do her job, sifts through clues as to why he left and tries to cobble together a future. McConnell explores other losses in Catherine's life simultaneously: that of her military pilot father, a gay friend dying of leukemia, and the abrupt end of a burgeoning affair with her widower boss. Precise, poetic images distinguish the prose (Everything is set at odd angles from this vantage point, Catherine observes from the Hotel Washington terrace, it is a crazy postcard shot, as if the nation's capital were caught unguarded in its sleep, as if unwatched the teapot buildings had begun to dance and change places) and a quiet but insistent tension keeps the pages turning. Agent, Fredrica Friedman. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Catherine and Harry are a young, engaged, power-couple living in Washington, D.C. They met in New York, fell madly in love, and moved to D.C. only because Harry got a job working for the president as a special advisor. Eventually, Catherine got work as a publicist for the vice president, and their carefree New York life became a memory because of the intrusion of the hectic political world. As their wedding date draws closer, Harry is spending less and less time at the apartment, leaving Catherine wondering if the wedding is such a good idea right now. It is when Harry leaves a cryptic note and goes missing that Catherine begins to wonder how much she really knows about Harry, his job, and what became of the man she fell in love with in New York. This first novel is a beautifully written story questioning how much we really know about those we love and lyrically detailing the loss of love and the grieving process. --Carolyn Kubisz Copyright 2005 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Harry meets Catherine in New York City and dumps her in Washington, D.C. But for most of the time, Harry isn't much in evidence at all, and the story becomes Catherine's melancholy one of true love found, lost, discarded and barely understood. The affair of these thirtysomething White House staffers ends in secrets and lies--Harry's, that is. He, a special adviser to the president, simply disappears one night, leaving her, a spokeswoman for the vice president, to figure out whether Harry fled in fear of love, or for love of duty. It hardly matters: Catherine rewards Harry's deceits with unwavering loyalty and perfect recall of their perfect past together. Catherine rails at--but relishes--their affair: an intensely romantic beginning, blameless middle, and sucker-punch end. First-novelist McConnell has a precise and poetic eye for the details of a love story set in New York, or for a career rise and fall set in small-town, big-ego Washington, D.C. She's sketchy on the psychological nuances of betrayal and deceit, though, satisfied to leave her heroine blissfully ignorant and maddeningly vulnerable. Subplots involving a romance between Catherine and her boss, the widowed vice president, and a best friendship with a gay White House employee are trite and predictable. Still, this is a praiseworthy effort to blend romance novel and spy tale, and to imbue the result with passion and poetry. Our heroine looks up at a night sky and wonders "about the astronauts' wives. I wondered if those women ever got mad at their loneliness. As they stood on the ground, pregnant and hot, I wondered if they ever looked up and cursed the men who left them for bigger things, for their own egos and glory and space." In the end, Catherine remains not only a victim of love but exiled from grown-up romance and murky modern-day politics. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Catherine meets Harry, and they have a lovely time getting to know each other while exploring their little corner of New York City. Soon, the two get engaged and move to Washington, DC, where Harry goes to work as a "special adviser" to the President and Catherine secures a job as publicist to the vice president. As their wedding date approaches, Harry's job becomes more and more mysterious, and then he disappears altogether. Sketchy evidence leads Catherine to wonder for whom he was really working. In McConnell's debut novel, loss follows loss. Interspersed throughout are post-Cold War politics and melancholic memories of New York and Catherine's childhood. Catherine spends most of the book in a fog of misery, as do the other major characters, which makes it tough for this story to get off the ground. A marginal purchase for public libraries.-Susanne Wells, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty., OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
On a Saturday I have to abandon the office to cut down bamboo in my mother's backyard. I know she worries about me. She sits, troubled, in her house on the highest point in Washington, thinking about my springtime spent in a windowless office. Her thirty-three-year-old daughter talks on the telephone all day-as she did as a teenager-her job somehow spun, made up by these patchy, thick conversations, fueled by coffee and ticking clocks. She guesses that I am distracted by the problems of other people, swallowed by their plans, ruined on my blurry trips between the Old Executive Office Building and the West Wing basement, my late-night dashes into glaring power. We never discuss my job, though I can't help thinking she views me from afar as a certain kind of ferry in some ever-near typhoon, her daughter chugging back and forth, carrying messages from one sorry piece of land to the other. She reminds me about her "psychic feelings," and by her tone I know these must be ones of darkness and doom.She tells me, too, that she respects journalists, believes in "integrity." And considering my job is to manage the media, herd them like a flock of sheep, she must be more concerned by this than my lack of fresh-air oxygen and my caffeinated complexion. Considering it was once my own vague ambition to be a journalist, she must fret about my own regrets. Plus, her daily view from her French doors over a long lawn to the lovely pines is being threatened by the bamboo.So I stand in the blinding sunlight on Saturday in the backyard of the house I lived in for eighteen years. I know I am pale, skinny, and my eyes are blocked by the same kind of sunglasses I wore in college-many such pairs bought, lost, crushed-Ray-Bans, very black. I like my brightness filtered.I walk down the sloping lawn and have forgotten how green the grass becomes in spring: sharp green even through camouflage glasses. The grass smells dark in the sunshine. It is the familiar damp scent of cool shadows, and it reminds me of the lawnmower buzz on late afternoons. The grass is flecked with violets, small purple spots woven across the endless green, but my feet crunch as I walk.The bamboo sprouts hide everywhere, and I step on them like crackle-back insects. Adult bamboo stands tall, three feet deep against the fence, swaying patiently in the breezes. However, its offspring pop up unexpectedly, spread through the lawn and surprise me like so many rumors. I make my way: bending, grabbing the asparagus-like shoots, and tossing them toward the fence.I haven't told my mother yet how much Harry has changed, slowly over two years and suddenly in the past two weeks. Maybe I am afraid of all sorts of psychic feelings. I will not tell her about the call on Thursday night, when the phone by our bedside sounded alarm at four A.M., the voice telling Harry something as he startled out of an already uneasy sleep. From the other side of the bed through the blue darkness, I watched Harry half-sitting Excerpted from Evidence of Love by Melissa McConnell 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.
