Again and Again

September 4, 2023
Evison (Lawn Boy) crafts a touching fantastical tale of a lonely elderly man’s past reincarnations. Eugene Miles, 105, lives in a California elder care facility, where he hopes to die for good, fearing he’ll lead yet another life of thwarted love if he’s born again. As a poor thief named Euric in Moorish Spain, he fell in love with a woman named Gaya, who saved his life after he was caught stealing, but they were separated under dramatic and tragic circumstances that Evison gradually doles out. First, though, the reader learns of Eugene’s other lives, including a turn as Oscar Wilde’s cat, when he believed Wilde was Gaya reincarnated. Each time the protagonist is reunited with a new version of Gaya, he ends up alone, such as when Wilde is imprisoned for indecency. As Eugene, he’s decided to close himself off from others. One day, however, Eugene meets a new nursing assistant named Angel, a young man who quickly disarms Eugene’s rough demeanor. Every day afterward, he tells Angel about his past lives under the gaze of Wayne, the residence’s mental health professional, who’s convinced Eugene’s stories are delusions. Though the ending feels unresolved, Evison evokes genuine emotions from the connection between cheery Angel and sour Eugene, and he keeps readers wondering whether Eugene is a misunderstood hero or an unreliable narrator. This touches the heart. Agent: Mollie Glick, Creative Artists Agency. (Nov.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misgendered the character Angel and incorrectly described his job.

September 15, 2023
An elderly man looks back on his life--or is it lives? Eugene Miles, the narrator of Evison's eighth novel, is about to turn either 106 years old or a thousand and change. Living in an eldercare facility, he regales one of its housekeepers, Angel, with tales of his past lives as Euric, a petty thief in 11th-century Seville; an Incan princess; an assistant to Lewis and Clark during their expedition; Oscar Wilde's housecat, and more. ("I'd lived a full life--seven full lives!") The facility's mental-health staff is skeptical, naturally, but Eugene's storytelling skills are top-notch, and Angel is particularly enchanted with Eugene's long-ago romance with Gaya, who saved him from the Moors' clutches and may have been reincarnated as a woman he knew in 1940s Los Angeles. As Eugene's stories pile up--and as he assists Angel with his own romantic struggles--some cracks in the unreliable narrator's facade begin to emerge. But Evison is concerned less with the factual accuracy of Eugene's experience than he is with how stories (even far-fetched ones) inspire empathy, and that togetherness, driven "purely by the desire to connect, is more meaningful than just about anything else." It's a sweet, borderline saccharine notion, and the novel is often nakedly sentimental when it isn't organizationally ungainly; Euric's tale dominates the past lives, with the others adding relatively little to the narrative. In prior novels like The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (2012) and This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! (2015), Evison demonstrated deep compassion toward hard-luck cases, the elderly, and the unwell. That's just as true here; true or not, Eugene's efforts to slay his past demons is affecting. But that plotline is subsumed by some cloying prose. Emotionally robust but structurally cumbersome.

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October 1, 2023
Eugene Miles is a relatively healthy 102-year-old (his age is in some dispute) enjoying his golden years at the Desert Greens nursing home reading, doing jigsaw puzzles, and having lunch with his new friend, Angel, a young staffer. Eugene regales Angel with stories and has enough memories to fill several lifetimes. In fact, that is the premise of Evison's tender and delightful latest, following Small World (2022). Eugene claims to have lived several lives, beginning with his time as a tenth-century pickpocket in Spain, where he met Gaya, the love of his lives. Eugene has spent subsequent lives, including one as part of the Lewis and Clark expedition, hoping to reunite with Gaya. Eugene also vividly reminisces about sleeking across Oscar Wilde's desk, crawling into his lap, and nuzzling his neck. It should be noted that Eugene was a cat in that life. Evison imbues his big-hearted narrative with sumptuous mystery and intrigue tracing Eugene's quest for love amid undiminished hope. Though Eugene has traversed multiple lands and time lines in different forms, his path is ultimately a map of the human heart.

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