SOURCE: Wiegand, David. “First Love as a Last Thought.” San Francisco Chronicle (25 October 1998): Sunday Review section, p. 4.

In the following positive review, Wiegand attributes the success of Evening to Minot's attention to detail.

The characters in Susan Minot's achingly sad new novel, Evening, are like figures in a Fairfield Porter painting of summer people in Maine: dappled by a special sunlight, rich enough to keep a safe distance from each other, secure and placid against all external reality.

Perhaps as an intentional reference to the Katharine Hepburn character in Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story, the central character is named Ann Lord. She is 65 and lies dying in a house in Cambridge, Mass., taking stock of her life and coming up empty. She has had three husbands—one she divorced, the other two she survived—and children by each of them.

But once upon a time, in the 1950s...