SOURCE: Fleming, Juliet. “Things Lost to Death.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5004 (26 February 1999): 23.

In the following review, Fleming explores Minot's ruminations on death in Evening.

The narrating consciousness of Susan Minot's third novel [Evening] belongs to sixty-five-year-old Ann Lord, as she slips, over the course of a few days, into death from cancer. Minot evokes with some precision the predictable intellectual and emotional terrors of Ann's position: her life has “not been long enough or wide”; she has not concentrated hard enough; has led her life “as if she were only halfway in it.” Alert to the imminence of her own physical extinction (“the pink sheet was the last sheet she'd use”), Ann realizes that it is not only people and things that will be lost in death, but the logic and memory of their use. Death “was coming to her slowly and the room remained indifferent. The bedposts...