Starting Out in the Evening

by Brian Morton

A New York Times Notable A friendship evolves between an aging author and a young grad student in a novel by the acclaimed author of Florence Gordon.  A PEN/Faulkner Award Nominee and one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the Year   Leonard Schiller is a novelist in his seventies, a second-string but respectable talent who produced only a small handful of books. Heather Wolfe is an attractive graduate student in her twenties. She read Schiller’s novels when she was growing up and they changed her life. When the ambitious Heather decides to write her master’s thesis about Schiller’s work and sets out to meet him—convinced she can bring Schiller back into the literary world’s spotlight—the unexpected consequences of their meeting alter everything in Schiller’s ordered life. What follows is a quasi-romantic friendship and intellectual engagement that investigates the meaning of art, fame, and personal connection. “Nothing less than a triumph,” Starting Out in the Evening is Brian Morton’s most widely acclaimed novel to date (The New York Times Book Review).

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, American, Adult Fiction, Literature

338 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.


BRIAN MORTON is the author of four previous novels, including Starting Out in the Evening, which was a Salon favorite book of the year and was made into an acclaimed feature film, and A Window Across the River, which was a Book Club selection on the Today show. He is the director of the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence and teaches at New York University and the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed Morton's most recent book Florence Gordon more than this. When I think of that book, I picture it in color, and this one I think about in black and white. That's the best way I can describe it. I found the people in this book less likeable; many of them being the kind of nakedly ambitious literary people I can't stand (full disclosure: I once one of these people, albeit not as talented :)).

To continue the comparison of these books...superficially, Leonard Schiller is similar to Florence Gordon; they both are over 70, both are writers struggling to remain relevant, and they both are strongly committed to art and ideas. Florence is more brash than Leonard, probably not the kind of person I'd want to be around in real life. But I found her more interesting to shadow than I did Leonard. I don't blame Morton for this; Schiller is fully realized and written well, but at the end of the day he's still a sad sack who spends all day in his stuffy, drab apartment writing what he agrees will be his last novel of his life.

Happily, we do meet his forty-year-old (or so) daughter Ariel, a shot of fresh air who stands in contrast to her father's dank, heavy, stoic life. Not only is she not a reader, but she has not read all of her father's books! It is very sweet to witness their awkward, but genuine love for each other -- present despite the fact that neither fully understands the other.

Schiller's life is shaken up by 24-year-old Heather Wolfe, who is writing her thesis on the old man's work. Wolfe is ambitious and clever, and she acts like a bit of a maniac around Schiller -- but her brash, forward behavior intrigues him. And he's certainly not going to stop a sharp, young woman in a miniskirt from paying him ample compliment.

Morton makes a convincing case somewhere in this book that novelists are all, in their way, ego maniacs. When Schiller takes Heather to a party attended by editors, writers, and other literary people, he gets all mopey when his "date" leaves his side to hob nob. Then he dismisses the personal library of the apartment's owner (his "friend," Leslie, who Schiller acknowledges treats him "according to how she was feeling about herself"), saying that every young editor in NYC "has the same library." They "featured nothing off the beaten track...no evidence of distinctive personal interest; no tokens of long, intellectual detours passionately explored." Fair enough, but then he reveals that "part of what was making him so mad, is that Leslie's alphabetized collection went from J.D. Salinger to Mona Simpson," which is to say, it featured none of his books.

I like to imagine what these scenes would have looked like had Morton dropped Florence in the middle of it. Things would have certainly turned out less angsty, that's for sure, as Florence would have spent the night issuing brutal verbal takedowns for other people's faux pas and weak intellectual arguments. We, as readers, would have had a better time is all I'm saying.

[Pamela Pickering · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 Stars, but just barely
This is a hard book to rate. There were several times when I just wanted to abandon it but then it just didn't quite put me off too much. But at other times I just felt very turned off as with one statement, "When he stood, he looked at his gray, fat penis, a smoked out stub of an antique cigar." Now why do I need to know that? I suppose if I were a man I would understand a little bit more of this fascination with a certain anatomical part but I'm not a man, I'm a woman. I'm not sure about other women but I don't focus on the change of my woo hoo through life.

A statement regarding another character in the book is worth mentioning.. He makes a statement referring to one of the main character's (an author) books "He finished it in one sitting--it was pretty light--and getting up he tossed it on the table and thought, Four people bothering each other. Who cares?" Frankly, it stated my feelings regarding this book exactly!

Having said that, I have to admit it did impact me in some ways. The author subtly portrays the transitions into the characters lives and how they deal with/accept them. Unfortunately it took the last few chapters to really hammer this message home. Sadly, I can see many abandoning the book before getting to this point.

[Yulia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This thoughtful and intelligent novel presents us with three individuals at different points in their lives: the first, Leonard Schiller, a 71-year-old author who, after two heart operations, knows he is close to death but is still determined to finish his last novel, even as his four previous works have gone out of print; the second, his 39-year-old daughter, Ariel, a dancer who has become an exercise instructor and is hoping to find fulfillment in becoming a parent finally; the third, Heather Wolfe, a 24-year-old graduate student looking to launch her career as a literary critic in New York and writing her thesis on the author who inspired her early pursuit of freedom. (There is a fourth character whose thoughts we also follow but I won't identify, as this individual enters the book only in the latter half.)

Morton is a master at getting into each of the character's minds, though they're of different generations, race, sex, and preoccupation, and he manages to make them each incredibly sympathetic even as they frustrate us and challenge our patience.

Even as the book itself weaves quotes from great artists into the fabric of the conversation on how to best live one's life, though never in a pedantic or obtrusive manner, it constantly presents the reader with its own passages worth recording and mulling over: on pursuing a creative life, having fun, striving, and struggling. This is a book whose ideas are worth contemplating, even if the plot urges us to speed through it to find out what happens next: my favorite combination.

What if the work you create inspires lessons that you don't necessarily intend? Is it worth creating if the product of your efforts will never be shared with others? What should drive us in our career: recognition, posterity, enjoyment, discipline, morals? What ought we to do if furthering our own goals means sacrificing the goals of others? At what point is it degrading to seek the approval of our mentors?

Though the word can make me queasy, it is true that this is an immensely tender book. Just don't read it in a car or plane if that unsettles you.

[Betsy Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the last Brian Morton book, Florence Gordon , that I read, this one takes place in my Upper Westside of Manhattan neighborhood, but even more personally, it inhabits the neighborhood of anybody who is aging—stunned by how fast time has gone, the changes to their body, the shift in their taste, and plagued by the question, "if what you offer the world isn’t needed, then why continue to bring it your offerings?" Since I'm a writer, and the story exposes a real writer's real mundane life, I was interested.

Starting Out in the Evening is the story of New York intellectual Leonard Schiller, a seventy-one year writer of “lonely integrity,” who meets twenty-four-year-old Heather, a calculating and shrewd grad student researching her master’s thesis on him. Here's why she is so enamored:

The people she admired in his books were people who walked away from the lives that other people expected them to live—Ellen in his first novel, the bohemian painters in his second. He had dwelled—in those early books, at least—on the glory of choosing your own life, even when it takes ruthlessness to do it.

And here's what she observes as she gets to know Schiller:

But now it occurred to her that he had only written about the beginning of the journey. He had never shown the consequences of the choice—never shown what happened to these people ten and twenty and thirty years down the line. And she felt that she was seeing the consequences, every day, in what she was seeing of him.

This is also the story of younger people observing older people. Here's an observation from Schiller's thirty-nine-year-old daughter, Ariel, who's in the "disorderly middle of life," witnessing her father in the hospital room of a dying friend, talking as they always do about writers and books:

To Ariel it seemed as if they were averting their eyes from the larger questions. But maybe their way was better than hers—maybe they were serving eternity precisely by staying faithful to daily life. If she didn’t understand her father’s friends, she felt that they didn’t even come close to understanding her. Though as intellectuals they probably liked to think that “nothing human was alien to them,” she found them narrow in their interests: the only thing they thrilled to, really, was the written word. Ariel was outside their radar.

In other words, the whole life process is observed from all angles with honesty. Why are we here? What are we doing? These are the questions Schiller explores:

The primary human need, he decided—stronger than the need for food or sex or love—is the need for recognition, the need to make a mark in the world. One makes one’s mark according to one’s capacities. If you have talents, you exercise them: if you’re Mozart you write The Magic Flute. And if you don’t have any talents, you thrust yourself into the path of others in cruder ways: you wear stupid T-shirts or you become the impresario of the back of the bus. And if your life has been stunted from the first by violence and harsh surroundings, then you steal things or destroy things or hurt people: anything, anything, to leave an image of yourself in other people’s minds.

Poignant, wise, sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, Starting Out in the Evening is a kind of languorous tour through Manhattan and aging.

[Marguerite Hargreaves · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 dead-on. 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.

[Anna Rohleder · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

When there is a mismatch between a persons idealized version and reality, what does one do?

Heather is a young woman who wants to write her graduate thesis on an author who has profoundly influence her life. For Heather, she was anxious in meeting her favorite author because she knew that her idolized expectation rarely meets the reality of the man. For Heather, fear of any undertaking means she should undertake it. For someone who persists despite fear of the unknown, means curiousity is what drives her. When uncertainty meets her, she charges forward. Whereas Heather thought of Schiller as her soulmate since his writing spoke to her soul, the physical reality of seeing an old man in front of her got in the way of her idealized vision of him.

Not only is she trying to write a thesis about him but she is also trying to build a career around reintroducing him to the world. The man who helped her develop as a person would also launch her own career. She entices him with her project by saying getting to know a young woman like herself might reinvigorate him. Just like his work has been an inspiration for her, she promises that she could be the much needed muse for him to finish his own book. When they got to his apartment because she wanted to borrow a copy of one of his books that she does not own, she noticed that the apartment smelled like an old man and he owned countless books which thrilled her; she felt that she was in the seat of power of the imagination. She stole a picture of him as a vigorous youth so she had something to go with her idealized vision of him. Heather uses her sexualized youth as bait so she can get to know him better.

Heather thinks Ariel is an airhead and she would be a better daughter to such a great literary mind. The fact that Heather thinks Leonard is a great writer while Arial is not much of a reader further decreased the esteem Heather has for Arial. Heather thinks that Arial is another boring 40 yrs old aerobic instructor obsessed with her biological clock and meditates for her "well-being". For Heather who is focused on her career she cannot relate to the seemingly pointless desire to reproduce instead of having an individual purpose that drives a person.

Young Heather did not belong to her ADHD generation. She loved to read had an intensity, wild, rebellious streak to her. While her parents settled into bourgeois contentment, she felt she was destined for greater things. She love Schiller's work because it gave her, her motto of personal liberation above all else. From his work, she learned that each person is responsible for their own happiness and one cannot be a caretaker for someone else's happiness no matter how much you love them.

Meeting Schiller thrilled her while she loved his intellectual power, she cannot stand the smell of the old man he has become. Although she imagined an artist as rebellious, Schiller fastidiousness was at odds with how he pictured the man who wrote so passionately about personal liberation would be. She admired the integrity of how serious he took his work but she saw the results of going against the grain meant he had to closet himself in a suit of emotional armor and become a fossilized man.

Schiller was preparing to die since he was young by living a spartan life so he would have a Buddhist detachment until Heather came and he re-experienced desire. He wanted her to be in love with him. Her radiant ugliness captivated him. He loved her spirited boldness and was full of life. Schiller took Ariel to a party by a former student and current publisher, Leslie. Schiller respected publishers who published books on its literary merit without regard to its commercial value. He is an old school purist who lived only for his art of writing.

He was jealous that Heather paid complete attention to Sandra a editor for the Village voice. When he decided to leave because he did not want to play second fiddle for Heather's affections, Heather decided to go with him to his apartment. Food play with honey allowed them to segue to physicality. As a youth, Schiller sexual energy was boundless but it gradually declined as he aged which was complicated with his numerous chronic disease. I like the description of how Leonard and Stella slowly and mutually discovered how to create mutual pleasure in each other. After Stella's death, his last 4 relationships held sexual desire as a minor component to all 4 relationships. It was touching how Schiller kept the date with Stella in Paris after 40 years and 30 years after her death. Their life in Paris was marked by simplicity, love, and work which was the happiest time in his life. For Schiller, he was glad that sex was in his past because it rarely flowed for him. Heather touching him asked him to go back to a period that was fraught with anxiety for him.

Schiller has gotten to a point in his life where reading a good book is preferable to having sex with a mid-twenty year old woman who is offering herself to him even if she says all she wants to do is to cuddle with him to ease his anxiety. He performed Reiki on her while she was nude and he is fully clothed while she looked straight into his eyes to look at his eternal youthful soul. Despite Heather's extensive sexual experience, only Schiller made her feel worthy of awe. Morning after their intimate encounter, he still made her feel worthy of awe. She left early after their intimate encounter because she liked leaving men wanting more of her. She felt intoxicated by her sexual generosity toward Schiller. But in the end, she forgot Schiller touching her. Heather's interest in Schiller made him feel young despite his chronic medical conditions. Schiller decided to give him the keys to the house to signify his trust in her.

After Schiller gave Heather the keys to the apartment, her initial reaction was to cringe but she decided to take the keys since she wanted to see what the natural conclusion to what she started would be. Whereas Schiller just wanted to stare at her in awe, she was ashamed by her crass desire to have and discard once her desired object was used up. When Heather finished the draft of her thesis for him to read, he knew there would be withering criticism of his work that he would not like. On Heather's 25th birthday when she gave him the finished thesis for him to read, he innately knew that their relationship was over. Schiller impressed Heather when he edited her thesis and returned her work to her. Schiller knew that Heather would never put him or his work in a book just as he was disappointed by a famous critic who despite promises to favorably critic his two novels he liked and place him on the literary map, never got around to doing it.

For awhile he stopped writing when he realized the world did not appreciate what he did. So, why do something that the world did not want until one night he learned from dreams that the world was bound by stories that give life meaning. For an atheist, he needed stories to make meaning in his life but he also realized that he is a writer because that was who he was not because of any external accolades.

Heather went from being Schiller's worshiper to his betrayer and now she wants to start over with their relationship. Heather still cared for Schiller as a friend whom she hoped to occasionally touch base with. When Schiller did not show up to their coffee date, she immediately went to his apartment only to find a stroked out Schiller. She did not want to see her idol as an invalid.

Ariel freaked out when she realized that her father and Heather had an intimate encounter. Ariel was shocked by the extreme age difference between her father and Heather. She also thought that he was betraying the memory of her mother. Aside from the extreme age difference between in age, Ariel needed to feel important to her father because for much of her life he was an absentee father because of his work.

Heather's thesis centered around personal liberation in Schiller's work. She wondered why Schiller's work took a turn for the worse after her first two books. Unlike Schiller, Sandra seemed to be a woman full of life so Heather naturally gravitated toward her. Both Sandra and Schiller encouraged, Heather to write with conviction and not to let feelings get in the way in the pursuit for the unvarnished truth. When she decided to write with conviction, her thesis flowed and she finished in the allotted time she gave herself. She decided the reason Schiller's work suffered was due to his stultifying routine of concentrating on his art instead of allowing competing interest from his life to inform his art. What once awed her about Schiller, his deliberate sense of self, meticulous purity in his writing, now annoyed her about him especially when she compared him to the vivacious Sandra. What she really loved was Schiller as a young man full of bravado that he no longer had because of age and disease. She felt disloyal but also believed in the conviction of the truth in her thesis.

Whereas Ariel's philosophy In life is go with the flow, Heather has go against the grain mentality. In driving, Ariel's advice of going with the flow saved them from a potentially disastrous accident. She hated Heather as much as Heather hated her. Ariel was jealous that Heather was successful n life and Ariel and she is not. While Heather had the optimistic promise of youth, Ariel is a washed-up has been which added to the uncomfortable competition between the two for Ariel's father's affection. As a child, Leonard ignored Ariel and lived in his own little world which explains why Ariel is no protective of his affections.

Ariel noticed her father changed the way he behaved around Heather and Ariel was jealous of the attention that Heather paid to Leonard. It is true that we change our behavior when we are trying to impress someone. Ariel wants her father to need her to feel useful. She was also touchy because Peter the guy who was suppose to be the father of her children found a younger girl to sleep around with. She wanted to forget her past now that Peter broke up with her and she quit her job.

She met a man who she named Victor Mature because he was ready to settle down just as she is ready to start having babies. While they both like Woody Allen, she was offended by a portrayal of an aerobics instructor as an airhead. She contends that being an aerobic instructor does not relate to the amount of depth a person has while Victor says she is being oversensitive to a movie character.

It was her Jewish sense of dread when something on the surface is too good to be true, it usually is that leads her to conclude that Heather is Leonard's "angel of death." Does having major surgery mean someone gives up and becomes depressed since his body is no longer his? When she got back to NYC, she concentrated on rehabilitating her father. She was touched that they shared the same longing for ecstasy. He wants to be a transcendentalist monk who combines stoicism, asceticism, and ecstasy. Her rehabilitation for him was a chance for her to have the father/daughter relationship that she never had growing up.

Although he tried to portray himself as a stand offish father, he really loved her and felt a dizzying rush of tenderness and protectiveness for her. For her birthday, they went to see Ariel's old dance company she was in until her knees gave out. Schiller thinks that Ariel was too innocently trusting of peoples and events in her life. Schiller was baffled by the kindness of strangers in the city. Even though all fathers are protective of their daughters, Ariel seems especially ill-equipped to live in NYC because of her trusting nature, talking to strangers, keeping her keys out where anyone could steal them. She was more like a child than a grown woman. She had two nervous breakdown; the first happened in her first year of college and the second was due to inevitable break-up with Peter.

When Ariel came home to take care of Leonard, he found she needed him as much as he needed her. His protectiveness of his daughter stems from when he juxtaposes her with the self-possessed Heather who seemed to have purpose in her life. Since Ariel's purpose of being dancer is in her past, she seems aimless compared to Heather whose purposes is mental and thus only old age dementia can take it away from her. Schiller can spin a tale out of nothing thus making her daughter feel better but one wishes he believed the tale he was spinning for Ariel instead of saying it for BS sake. At least Schiller is a good dad trying to make his daughter feel good about her ditzyness of consulting a psychic. She retained her physical exuberance of her youth with an inalienable core of well-being. As Schiller proves no one wants to die a slow painful death, no one ever wants to have a chronic disease that makes him slowly decay. Being in the declining stage of his life, Schiller was annoyed in seeing healthy young people dance. Leonard can not relate to Ariel need for partnership since he has been by himself for a long time that he has forgotten the feelings of longing.

Victor is a compromise boyfriend a decent guy whom Ariel wants just to have kids with not love. Ariel was ready to sleep with Victor on her third date with him but rejected him instead because he was not passionate about his job. She wanted to be with someone who was in love with his job. She was married to Ted for two and a half years in her late twenties to a forty year but they could not have kids for some reason. She then proceeded to go out with a few men who did not want to have kids or she did not want to have kids with them. After Victor, Ariel started dating Sam who pontificated though most of the things he talked about was interesting; the problem was he would not shut up when he started talking. For example, who knew that public transit used to be run by competing private enterprise and had to be bailed out by government since it was a losing enterprise. Of course since it became a public good, then government kept it.

During her date with Sam, Ariel bumped into Casey whom she was still in love with so she left her date with Sam for Casey. For his part, Casey loved Ariel's youthful exuberance and the fact that she always managed to make him smile. Although Ariel suggested that they keep the relationship light, the issue of children threatened to derail the relationship again. Casey did not want to have children because the first time he tried marriage with kids was an utter failure. He still felt the result of the divorce from his first wife stunted the growth and relationship with his son William and thought the responsible thing to do is not to have children. Although both Casey and Leonard had an antipathetic relationship when Ariel first introduced him, Leonard warmed up to Casey when he helped Leonard out when he had a stroke. Casey was also amazed by Ariel's care taking instincts that he lacked. Instead of dying and going to heaven, Leonard decided to live not because of his daughter Ariel but because he had unfinished business in the book dedicated to Stella.

When stroke made Leonard an invalid, Heather tried to be nice to him but was met by a slap in her face for her insincerity. In the end, he slapped her because their relationship changed from one that helped the other out to Heather not wanting to see Leonard because she would pity him. When you cannot control your body anymore, is it time to die? What good is life when one has to struggle to live?

[Veronica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impossible to tell which characters and details will leave and which will sulk about. Becoming locked out of schiller’s mind after the hospital, heather leaving chapters early. Casey seeming to be just the name of an ex but then becoming a major part of the latter half of the novel.Most of the biggest plot points not literally resolved, but emotionally. I loved piecing together major events in the character’s lives from a few offhand comments. Ariel mentioning she has trouble hearing from her right ear, and then heather reading in schiller’s novel about an author who ignored his baby daughter’s screams to continue writing, only to have this hesitation result in the fever his baby had permanently damaging the the hearing in her right ear.

[La La · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars on the blog.

RTC

This will definitely be a re-read for me in the future!

[Pornwan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I watched the film adaption before reading the book. The film, though rather well made, does not give enough clues over Heather's motives for seducing Leonard so aggressively, whether she does desire him, or simply just tries to build his trust in her since she strikes me as a manipulator from the start. My own interpretation is that she does desire her imaginary version of him, the body of a virile intense man who views freedom as a choice one has to make no matter who pay the price for it. The next day I ran to a bookstore to find the book and finished it in one go. The book confirms my thought. As manipulative as she may seem,she is just a classic case of a person, who has developed passion for books and tends to identify herself with a character in a story that reflects her own situation at a particular point in time. She feels the man behind the character has lived in her inner thought and speak it so vividly. Over the years, she had built and fallen in love with her own version of Leonard. Growing up, she had naively and shallowly believed that she could revive his soulful youth and transform it into a creative energy for his final book.

Her aggressive pursue produces a destructive outcome that affects so many lives even her own. She finds out he is not a courageous man of her imagination, but instead a mammoth that is too old to adjust to any kinds of transformation. His daughter is even more disappointing, a shallow but kind-hearted being whom she dismisses as not belonging to the Leonard-Heather intellectual world. Before long she begins to see him differently, or more accurately his true self. He is no longer an emblem of artistic dignity, but of a stupid unconformity. The disappointment drives her away from him.

The familiar form of expectation is then passed along to Leonard like a disease. It does not take that long for him to fall in love with her, the kind of love that brings him back the passion he lost with the death of his wife. She does come to revive his soul with her youthful determination, only to take it away later. It was not a deliberate cruelty. She is full of guilt. But she opts for the choice all of Leonard's heroines would have made, a courage to live her own life. Her choice is however made when he does not have much time to live. He no longer has the same sympathetic comprehension for her as he did for his heroines (based on his wife) years ago. And that is why he slaps her in the face for disrupting his ordinary life.

The book displays how unmet expectations affect different people of varrying levels of fragility and ages. Heather moves on quickly to another mentor, Sandra, only to be disappointed again, after Leonard failed her completely. She is still young, hopeful and has surplus energy that can be drawn in time of pain. Leonard, on the contrary, is left devastated beyond repair, physically and emotionally. His remaining bit of self-esteem is temporarily bolstered by her and then perpetually crushed by her.


Another noteworthy character in this book is Leonard's daughter, Ariel. Through Heather's eyes, she is the polar opposite of her father. But in fact, they exhibit similar potrayal of underachiver. Like her father, she had once dreamt of being the master of her craft. She was once a hopeful dancer. But life has shrinked her into just an aerobic teacher, a career she despises due to a shallow brainless stereotype people tend to build around it. She is one of the classic examples of children who fail to live up to their parents' legacy. The world, even they themselves, always give them cruel judgment. Her prime hope is to have a child before turning 40, a hope that Heather dismisses as not worthy of her heroe's daughter. But who can blame her? It is the only hope a fragile woman of her age has left to look forward to. No matter how hard her father tries to convince that she is still young and full of capacity, she still cannot bring herself to believe that. She thinks her life would be over soon unless she produces a child. The reason is he himself is not in the position to comfort her since he in fact is the mirror image of her, the once promising author whose creativity has deteriorated with time.

This is the kind of book that I will revisit again and again. It potrays the damages the unfulfilled hopes do to human at different ages with subtlety. Those who are still young and optimistic and have not been much damaged, like Heather, are not easily deterred by it. She still can gather her strength and move on to pursue her next goal. Leonard and his daugther, already aged and middle-aged, on the other hand, cannot bounce back quickly. Years of failed attempts and aging have taken away their energy and self-confidence, to the point that the memories of their earlier achievements no longer mean anything to them.

[Dan Lawton · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 him—both physically and certainly with his literary ventures—but 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 meaning—and 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.

[JoAnn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love a good character-driven novel and Morton's recently-released Florence Gordon is among the best I've read. After finishing that unexpected gem (a 5-star read and favorite of 2014) I dove straight into his backlist, selecting this 1998 title because it was on my library's shelf. Once again I found an introspective, intelligent novel, a slow unfolding of characters, and beautiful writing.

[Kendall · Rating 1 out of 5]

Given the amount of time I spent complaining about this book to anyone that would listen, anything greater than one star would be too generous.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this book was amazing. About writing and growing old and betrayal. Each of the characters was initially unlikeable in some way, and gradually, the writer pulled me in, made them utterly lovable.

I hadn't realized I had read this book ten years ago. I had completely forgotten it, no recognition at all. It was a totally new and unfamiliar book. And I loved it again, I did. Only this time I am ten years older, closer to the age of the older man, Schiller, the writer. The adoring fan of his writing, Heather, was who I was as a young student.

"Ever since she was in high school--ever since fifth grade, with her failed poet of an English teacher--intellectual communion and intense flirtation had grown from the same root. She'd always had a love of learning, a love of knowledge, but it was always an embodied love: she desired this man's learning, or that woman's. The desire to learn from people was always bound up with the desire to seem special to them. Heather didn't merely want her teachers to teach her: she wanted them to single her out." This rings so true for me.

(118)Heather is thinking of authors she studied in her American Literature classes. Hemingway had faded terribly, by the end of his life he was writing imitations of his earlier work. You could say something similar about Faulkner or Sherwood Anderson, or Edith Wharton, or Richard Wright. Maybe it's inevitable. Maybe you only feel things strongly when you're young. But thinking about it later she realized that certain authors managed to stay fresh even in old age. Yeats, for instance, grew younger as he grew older: his work grew stronger and more muscular as he aged. George Eliot got steadily better: more intelligent, more original, more faring. D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf may not have gotten better, but they continued to experiment relentlessly as long as they lived.

137) As the bus shuddered back into traffic, Schiller had a revelation. A theory of human nature blossomed: The primary human need, Schiller decided--stronger than the need for food or sex or love--was the need for recognition, the need to make a mark in the world...and if you life has been stunted by violence and harsh surroundings, then you steal or destroy things, you hurt people, to leave an image of yourself in other people's minds.

184) He understood why we dream. During the night the body shuts down, and the mind receives little information from the outside world; but the narrative function of the mind remains awake, laboring to make stories out of the little information it receives--out of hints and scents and glimmers and tapping sounds...The story making organ never sleeps. ...The world, the human world is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories. Nothing has meaning in itself: all the objects in the world would be shards of bare mute blankness spinning wildly out of orbit, if we didn't bind them together with stories.

190) great moment when the novel contains its own indictment. Casey thinks his girlfriend, Ariel is too tied up, psychically, with her father. Whom he'd always thought of as a loser, a man who'd spent his entire life writing something like three books...He'd read one...it was pretty light...Four people bothering each other. Who cares. Later Casey thinks...What matters isn't finding the kind of person you think you "should" love. What matters is finding someone you feel more alive with. As he tries to heal...he thinks about Henry James . In "The Ambassadors," when Lambert Strether, a sheltered middle-aged American, pays a visit to France, he is rejuvenated by its broader moral atmosphere, and he realized that he has never really lived. In the central scene of the novel, he sits with a young friend in a quiet garden in the Faubourg-Saint-Germain and implores the young man to "live" while he's still young, to live all he can.

[Joy H.]

Added 4/13/2009
_Starting Out In the Evening_ by Brian Morton (first published 1997)

NOTE (9/2/11): The GR Constant Reader Group has invited the author of this book, Brian Morton, to have dinner with the CR group at their October-2011 Convention in NYC. See the following thread:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/5...
According to a post at the group, the date and place are:
Sunday, 10/16/11, dinner with Brian Morton: Rosa Mexicano at Lincoln Center (6:30-9 PM)
For confirmation, see the following thread which has the tentative schedule of the convention:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/6...

Below is a link to a "Today Book Club" video in which this book is discussed by the author:
http://v5.app.msn-int.com/watch/video...

April 2009: Below are the comments I posted in my group's movie thread:
===============================================
Today I streamed a movie from Netflix. It was a film adapted from the book, Starting Out In the Evening (1997) by Brian Morton.
"Starting Out in the Evening" (2007):
Netflix description: http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/Starti...

Goodreads says it's "a study in the danger of expectations." I don't think that explains the story very well. Instead, I like what the NY Times review said:
"And wisdom — the chastened acceptance of limitation, the resolve to keep going anyway — is the subject of this fine, modest film."

Frank Langella was highly praised for his understated role as an elderly writer who is encouraged by an ambitious young female student to keep writing. The dialogue includes some interesting discussions about literature and writing. The story is character-driven, as opposed to plot-driven. As critic James Berardinelli says: "Not a lot happens in Starting out in the Evening, but what occurs irrevocably changes the lives of the four principals."

Berardinelli's review: http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_t...
NYTimes review: http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/...

PS: I agree with Berardinelli when he says that the ending wasn't satisfying. As he says, it felt as if something was missing. Otherwise I would have given the film 4 stars out of 5. Intead, I gave it 3 stars. Leave it to Berardinelli to zero-in on what was bothering me about the movie. He always seems to make the right points.

PPS: Below is a quote from Roger Ebert's review which contains a truth which all writers know:
====================================================
"(1) the Muse visits during, not before, the act of composition, and (2) the writer takes dictation from that place in his mind that knows what he should write next."
-from a review by Roger Ebert of movie "Starting Out In the Evening".
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/p...

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 long-term with her desperate desire to have a child before she's too far out of her 30's.

Not the nutshell: I can't say enough how charmed I am by these characters. They're relatively self-aware--Schiller 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 struggle--and mostly fail--to 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 last 50 pages 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 assembly-line 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.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 isn’t 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.”

“That’s how I feel now. About myself. I don’t feel like an old man. I feel as if I’m still ripening. I feel as if I’m just starting to understand things. But what’s the use of this ripeness? It doesn’t give birth to anything. It doesn’t nourish anything. It just disappears.”

[Ginger Bensman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Brian Morton’s 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: seventy-one year-old Leonard Schiller—a widowed writer who is overweight and suffering from a heart condition, his thirty-nine year-old daughter, Ariel—a dancer with a free spirit, and Heather Wolfe—a 24-year-old 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 aptly—your 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.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was one of those novels that I appreciated more than enjoyed, one that left me with decidedly mixed feelings about the characters. It took me a long while to warm up to any of them, though by the conclusion I was more sympathetic to at least two out of the three protagonists. For these two, serious challenges brought out hidden strengths, while the third continued throughout to bask in her own ego. On the whole, though, not so enjoyable.

At the same time, I feel Morton may well have been distinguishing between the young, who tend more toward self-confidence, idealism, and an inflated view of themselves and their futures, and the older, who have experienced disillusionment and loss and have grown in humility as a result. This I could appreciate.

So, which do I value more in a novel? Hidden depths or a connection to the characters? Both together are quite delightful; when it’s either/or, my rating is 3 stars.

[Alex Templeton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read 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. At 16 (when it was first published and I first read it), I didn't like it. I thought the characters were weird and crazy. At 19, 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 25, 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.

[Dianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure why this book spoke to me so much. Maybe because the main character is 71-years old, and I'm about to turn 70. At any rate, this isn't a plot-driven book...more of an exploration the internal musings of a man with work still to do at the end of his life, his reflections on his very happy marriage to a wife who died some years before, and his loving relationship with his somewhat eccentric 39-year-old daughter. Add to this a rather brash young student doing a master's thesis on the author's work and coming to terms with her life and who she will be, and this book just sang for me. Highly recommended, if you don't need lots of plot.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first saw the movie and from the story knew I had to read the book. I was taken in when Schiller visits his friend Levin in hospital where they discuss authors such as Henry James, Saul Bellows... I was hooked. Brian Morton wrote so poignantly of Schiller's relationships, the friendships he had with his (mainly) dying friends, his daughter and, of course, Heather, the young woman who has come, in a sense, to save him. Ah, the circle of life; the energy and vitality of the young, the mid-life and yearnings of Aerial all rounded up with the wisdom and reality of life and mortality that one only learns through living. Five stars to Brian Morton. I look forward to more!

[Mary Gardner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is absolutely beautiful. The interplay among novelist Leonard Schiller, his daughter, and his admirer, Heather rings so true. What really got me though, was his reflections on what it means to be a writer for his entire life, the rewards and the sacrifices. I'm now anxious to see the film, with Frank Langella and Lili Taylor.

It's interesting that my to-read list, which dates back as far as 1998, is being beat out by screen versions of these 10-year old books (e.g. About a Boy, The Constant Gardener).

[Holly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Painfully slow, uber literary, pointless. The elderly writer was a caricature. The young woman false, imperious, judgmental, conceited, and completely implausible…an ingenue? A muse? Who knows. The daughter, just unlikely; her story was completely in the background then suddenly became important then didn’t go anywhere. So clearly written by a man. The female characters just didn’t make sense. A dull and pointless story full of NY literati name dropping.

[Iva · Rating 2 out of 5]

Annoying details and excessive description spoiled what could have been an intelligent literary examination. I never believed in any of the characters--but I enjoyed Morton's musings on literature.

[Marli · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely not my type of book.

[Melanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really disliked this book. If I was a person who could stop reading books once I had started them, I would have.

[Robert Hazelwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

A mess of a novel about an author writing a mess of a novel.

[Lorraine Devon Wilke · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can read ten books you thoroughly enjoy but still suddenly come upon one whose story is so original, whose premise is so out of the ordinary, that it stands out in stark literary relief.

STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING was one of those books for me.

I didn’t notice that it was originally published over ten years ago; I didn’t know it had ever been made into a movie; I knew nothing about it and yet was drawn in by the story described in the book blurb. It sounded interesting. It was. And so much more.

Briefly, it tells the tale of a young woman, Heather Wolfe, a voracious reader from early childhood on, who decides to write her Master’s thesis on a semi-distinguished novelist, Leonard Schiller, whose first two books were transformational for her. She pursues a meeting in New York, and from that moment on, these two characters enter into a relationship that so unexpectedly defies standard tropes, that so surprises with unusual tendernesses and painful dismissals, that their emotional intimacy gives the story its heart and soul.

But there’s also the concurrent story of Ariel, Schiller’s daughter, and her earnest, occasionally painful quest to find love and meaning in her own life, to find a manageable way to have a child without a man; to find clarity in being her father’s daughter while still struggling to define herself. The man who comes in and out of her life, Casey, has his own narrative trajectory, and that exploration also opens doors and windows into various cultural considerations, including race and its inevitable bump-ups against white privilege.

These stories exist alone even as they intertwine, and we travel those parallels while simultaneously climbing inside the profound existential perspectives of a dying man of brilliance and the women who swirl in his orbit, including his dead wife who remains a salient force in his memory.

I particularly enjoyed author Brian Morton’s musings—via his protagonist—on the process of writing, or not writing, as well as the provocative, ethereal explorations of life, of creativity, of death and its hovering influence over life. There were so many passages I wanted to remember I expect I’ll go back to find them again and write them down this time.

The writing is exquisite in every way: smart, evocative, so poignant, colorful and emotional, I felt as if I was living and breathing in the universe created. Having just returned from Paris myself, I found his chapters taking place there to be as alive as my own visceral, tactile, exhilarated moments experienced in that iconic city… his descriptions of the revelation of the Eiffel Tower unbelievably mirrored my own.

And, certainly, the main character of this book, Leonard Schiller, is a person of such unfathomable shades and colors, of nuances and depth so well illustrated, so beautifully articulated and defined, he was as alive as any man you might meet. Further research showed me that actor Frank Langella played him in the film, but I’m glad I didn’t know that before I read; the Leonard Schiller in my own mind was completely different, but, I’m certain, as accurately imagined as the author intended.

A book of such thoughtful, tender, compassionate humanity I wanted it to never end… just as I wanted the characters Mr. Morton created to, despite the demands of life and time, to live forever. I’m grateful that, by the parameters of fiction, they will.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Starting Out in the Evening by Brian Morton makes a case for the dying literary and intellectual culture of New York City in the late 90s. It reminded me of one of Woody Allen’s black-and-white movies, both in its tone and setting - a dying writer reflecting on his life and career set against the changing landscape of Manhattan – specifically the Upper West Side, and its dynamic between the elderly male author’s relationship and the bright-eyed 24-year-old girl intent on figuring out the mystery of his career for her PhD thesis.

At first, I feared it would be a one-note story of a worshipful girl having an affair with an old guy (the novel consistently details Schiller’s ‘bloated’ appearance) because she’s infatuated by his mind. But this idea was quickly dispelled (their relationship is never sexual) as the novel constantly interrogates the internal workings of each character’s mind and motivations. At 71, Leonard Schiller has devoted his life to the craft of writing fiction. He's produced four books: two “great” ones and two mediocre ones. Content in his obscurity, he’s thrown when Heather, a grad student, shows up at his door, wanting to integrate herself into his life and to make him/his work relevant again. The third character is Arielle, Schiller’s 39-year-old daughter, a flighty aerobics teacher obsessed with having a baby (& finding a tolerable man to have one with).

It gorgeously captured what the city was like in the late ‘90s (I was 5, but I’m basing this on home videos & books & films), and while some of the language skewed outdated (though importantly, never malicious), the descriptions of how his characters view the world was lovely – Schiller views life through a sort of ‘grateful for the time we’ve had’ lens, and his descriptions of how much he loved his wife were moving. Heather veers a little too ‘impressed by everything’ at the start but is quickly hardened by the city without losing her love for it. At first Arielle’s openness to life reads like a lack of intelligence (and dangerous in NYC), but as you go on it seems like her constant optimism about the world is something to be cherished, especially as it seems to keep knocking her down.