All He Ever Wanted
Anita Shreve, 2003
Little, Brown & Co.
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781615568635
Summary
In the wake of such acclaimed #1 bestsellers as The Pilot's Wife, The Last Time They Met, and Sea Glass, Anita Shreve gives us a brilliant new novel about love, jealousy, and loss. It is the story of a man whose obsession with a young woman begins when he meets her fleetingly—as he helps her escape from a fire in a restaurant—and culminates in a marriage doomed by secrets and betrayal.
Written with the intelligence and grace that are Anita Shreve's hallmarks, this gripping tale is peopled by unforgettable characters as real as the emotions that bring them together. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1946
• Raised—Dedham, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A. Tufts University
• Awards—PEN/L.L. Winship Award; O. Henry Prize
• Currently—lives in Longmeadow, Massachusetts
Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of nearly 20 books—including two works of nonfiction and 17 of fiction. Her novels include, most recently, Stella Bain (2013), as well as The Weight of Water (1997), a finalist for England's Orange prize; The Pilot's Wife (1998), a selection of Oprah's Book Club; All He Even Wanted (2003), Body Surfing (2007); Testimony (2008); A Change in Altitude (2010). She lives in Massachusetts. (From the publisher.)
More
For many readers, the appeal of Anita Shreve’s novels is their ability to combine all of the escapist elements of a good beach read with the kind of thoughtful complexity not generally associated with romantic fiction. Shreve’s books are loaded with enough adultery, eroticism, and passion to make anyone keep flipping the pages, but the writer whom People magazine once dubbed a “master storyteller” is also concerned with the complexities of her characters’ motivations, relationships, and lives.
Shreve’s novels draw on her diverse experiences as a teacher and journalist: she began writing fiction while teaching high school, and was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975 for her story, "Past the Island, Drifting." She then spent several years working as a journalist in Africa, and later returned to the States to raise her children. In the 1980s, she wrote about women’s issues, which resulted in two nonfiction books—Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone—before breaking into mainstream fiction with Eden Close in 1989.
This interest in women’s lives—their struggles and success, families and friendships—informs all of Shreve’s fiction. The combination of her journalist’s eye for detail and her literary ear for the telling turn of phrase mean that Shreve can spin a story that is dense, atmospheric, and believable. Shreve incorporates the pull of the sea—the inexorable tides, the unpredictable surf—into her characters’ lives the way Willa Cather worked the beauty and wildness of the Midwestern plains into her fiction. In Fortune’s Rocks and The Weight of Water, the sea becomes a character itself, evocative and ultimately consuming. In Sea Glass, Shreve takes the metaphor as far as she can, where characters are tested again and again, only to emerge stronger by surviving the ravages of life.
A domestic sensualist, Shreve makes use of the emblems of household life to a high degree, letting a home tell its stories just as much as its inhabitants do, and even recycling the same house through different books and periods of time, giving it a sort of palimpsest effect, in which old stories burn through the newer ones, creating a historical montage. "A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell," she says. "I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house."
Shreve’s work is sometimes categorized as "women’s fiction," because of her focus on women’s sensibilties and plights. But her evocative and precise language and imagery take her beyond category fiction, and moderate the vein of sentimen-tality which threads through her books. Moreover, her kaleidoscopic view of history, her iron grip on the details and detritus of 19th-century life (which she sometimes inter-sperses with a 20th-century story), and her uncanny ability to replicate 19th-century dialogue without sounding fusty or fussy, make for novels that that are always absorbing and often riveting. If she has a flaw, it is that her imagery is sometimes too cinematic, but one can hardly fault her for that: after all, the call of Hollywood is surely as strong as the call of the sea for a writer as talented as Shreve. (Adapted from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Anita Shreve knows something about narrative momentum. Whether you line up at the library to reserve her latest novel or roll your eyes at the melodrama that heats up her pages, once they are turning you will not be bored. All He Ever Wanted is no exception. It may not be particularly memorable, but it is artful entertainment, with the occasional neat turn of phrase as an added bonus.
Janice P. Nimura - Washington Post
Shreve is by far one of the finest novelists of her time.
Boston Globe
In bestsellers such as Fortune's Rocks, Shreve has revealed an impeccably sharp eye and a generous emotional sensitivity in describing the moment when a man and a woman become infatuated with each. She is less successful this time out, perhaps because the epiphany is one-sided. Escaping from a New Hampshire hotel fire at the turn of the 20th century, Prof. Nicholas Van Tassel catches sight of Etna Bliss and is instantly smitten. She does not reciprocate his feeling, for she has her own unrequited lust, for freedom and independence. That they marry guarantees tragedy. Nicholas tells the story in retrospect, writing feverishly on a train trip in 1933 to his sister's funeral in Florida. His pedantic style is full of parenthetical asides, portentous foreshadowing and rhetorical throat. His erotic swoon commands sympathy, until it carries him past any definition of decency. He will do anything to bring down Philip Asher, his academic rival and the brother of Etna's true love, Samuel. He plays on prevailing anti-Semitism (the Ashers are Jewish), and he persuades his daughter, Clara, to claim that Philip touched her improperly, which besmirches not only Philip's reputation but Clara's as well. We see Etna herself only secondhand, except for some correspondence with Philip reproduced toward the end of the tale. Credit the author for making the point that Etna and her sisters had too little autonomy even to tell their own stories, but filtering Etna's experience through Nicholas's sensibility deprives the novel of intimacy and immediacy.
Publishers Weekly
At the turn of the 20th century, Nicholas Van Tassel, an English literature professor at a small New Hampshire college, manages to escapes from a hotel fire. As he stands in the dark among the other souls lucky enough not to have perished, he sees Etna Bliss. Though she is not beautiful, he is immediately drawn to her. The result of that first fateful meeting is an obsession from which he is unable to escape. Nicholas courts Etna and eventually marries her, though she admits that she does not love him and never can. The jealousy that begins to simmer on their wedding night eventually leads to Nicholas's demise. Their marriage, though filled with companionship, mutual respect, and concern about their two children during the daylight hours, grows ever more precarious as evening draws near. Ultimately, a betrayal occurs. Shreve's prose is as compelling as the story itself, and her characters are all too human in their weaknesses. The author asks whether we can really possesses another person and reminds us of our tendency to cling to the past. Readers who loved Shreve's portrayal of human relationships and her building of tension, particularly in The Pilot's Wife, will find it again here. For most public libraries. —Nanci Milone Hill, Lucius Beebe Memorial Lib., Wakefield, MA
Library Journal
Shreve daringly makes the bad guy her narrator in a creepy tale of relentless love. Nicholas Van Tassel may not seem so awful at first, as he describes the hotel fire in the winter of 1899 that introduced him to Etna Bliss. We quickly see that this 30-year-old English professor at Thrupp College in New Hampshire is pompous, ambitious, and something of a hypocrite, as well as a minor plagiarist, but we're inclined to sympathy thanks to Nicholas's immediate passion for Etna. Her mother has recently died, she's living temporarily with her uncle, and the future seems to promise little more to this regal and mysterious woman than life as an unpaid governess to her sister's children. Unless she marries Nicholas, that is, who isn't above pressing his suit on those grounds. She accepts, making sure he knows that "I don't think that I could...love you...in the way that a wife must love a husband." (Their sex life, in fact, proves a disaster.) We already know through Nicholas's framing narration, from September 1933, that this marriage has turned out badly-but the story's central section, from fall 1914 through spring 1915, reveals just how badly-and just how far Nicholas is prepared to go to assert his desires. As he campaigns to be named dean of Thrupp's faculty, he learns that Etna has a secret independent life. It's entirely innocent, but that doesn't stem Nicholas's rage, especially when he learns that his wife had a lover before they were married. Shreve lets her narrator damn himself by his own sanctimonious words as he stoops to Jew-baiting, marital rape, and persuading his teenaged daughter to tell a catastrophic lie-all to further his ambitions, which, it becomes increasingly plain, are not just selfish but scarily obsessive. Still, since Nicholas is our window into the events, we feel his humanity even as he performs a series of despicable acts. Full-bodied storytelling with an unflinching moral backbone: one of Shreve's best.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How would you describe the voice of the novel's narrator? What does the manner in which Nicholas Van Tassel tells the story suggest to you about his character? How reliable a narrator is he?
2. We learn about Etna only through Nicholas. Do you think we see her clearly? What role do the "letters" play? What about Nicholas's comments and asides on these letters? Do they shed more light on Nicholas or on Etna?
3. Some readers have seen Nicholas as a monster; others have been moved by his humanity. How do you feel about him? Do you think he knows himself?
4. Do you agree with Nicholas's own assessment that "we design our own fate, to suit our circumstances" (page 45)?
5. Do you agree with his idea about "the necessity of having extraordinary love returned in order to have achieved true greatness" (page 127)?
6. When Nicholas begins to court Etna, he makes the distinction between the qualities of a woman and the qualities of a wife. What does he imply with his musings? How does he define Etna?
7. After Nicholas and Etna's wedding, the narrator jumps ahead fourteen years. Why do you think he chooses to do this? What is the benefit of sweeping past those first years of the marriage?
8. Nicholas has a tense relationship with one of his students, Edward Ferald. Why does Nicholas feel such animosity toward Edward? How does this color Nicholas's future at Thrupp?
9. Etna accepts Nicholas's proposal but promises that she can never love him. Why does Etna agree to marry Nicholas? What does she hope to achieve with this marriage? And after finding herself trapped in a restrictive role as Nicholas's wife, why does she remain in the marriage for so long?
10. After her uncle's death, Etna informs Nicholas, "It is a treasure. To be able to love someone in that way. So thoroughly. So freely" (page 159). Discuss the significance of this statement.
11. Discuss Nicholas's relationship with his children.
12. Etna is an enigmatic figure. Analyze her means of escape within her marriage.
13. After Nicholas discovers Etna's house, she insists that she must have her own space in order to claim her independence. Does Etna achieve her goal in the end? How much power does she have in her relationship with her husband?
14. In his wife's absence, Nicholas wonders whether he was set free as well (page 304). Can Nicholas fully escape his obsession? What are his feelings for Etna thirty years later? Despite his lengthy journal, does Nicholas ever truly understand Etna?
15. What do the parenthetical asides woven throughout the narrative reveal about Nicholas's character? Do you think these devices are effective?
16. Why do you think Nicholas chooses to tell the story when he is in his sixties? How might the story be different if told without the benefit of Nicholas's hindsight?
17. The story's frame is a train ride that Nicholas takes en route to his sister's funeral. How does Nicholas's account of the events that transpired on this journey resonate with the story of Nicholas and Etna's relationship?
18. How does Nicholas change, if at all, in the course of this novel? What has he learned from his time with Etna?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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