Evenings at Five

February 17, 2003
A starred or boxed review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of exceptional importance that hasn't received a starred or boxed review. EVENINGS AT FIVE Gail Godwin. Ballantine, $14.95 (114p) ISBN 0-345-46102-9 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.

December 1, 2002
Now that her composer husband is dead, Christina dreads "evenings at five"-the hour that the couple set aside for heart-to-hearts.

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2003
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)