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Wish You Were Here by Stewart O’Nan Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Lake Luster Spend a week with an extended family at the lake in Chautauqua as you read Stewart O’Nan’s latest novel, Wish You Were Here. Three generations gather for the last week they’ll ever spend at the family summer house on the lake. The widowed matriarch has sold the home, with the year following her husband’s death, and without communicating her reasons to her children, who have lives full of their own losses and disappointments, as do their children. Three generations feeling miserable on vacation. And then it rains. Day by day, at around 70 pages per day, O’Nan takes us through the week, examining the lives, concerns and pain of each character. Here’s an excerpt: “Such a minor inconvenience could not stop her from falling under the spell of Chautauqua once they started walking again. Girls with violin cases strapped to their backs like soldiers rode by on bikes, late for practice. She knew each street and grove intimately, the way her children knew the rides at Kennywood Park. Like them, she had her favorites. The amphitheater with its Doric columns. The Italianate bell tower, its red tile roof, the clock demurely striking the quarter hour with a single sweet peal. Children’s Beach and Palestine Park, the diorama of the Holy Land fashioned like a giant sandcastle. Ivied Smith Library, where she’d spent hours in the cool children’s room, the light caught in the varnished floor. That was what was the same – the light, the way it angled across tree trunks and fell on lawns, bounced off flowers. On certain streets, at a certain angle, it could be 1938, 1946 again, and there was something reassuring about that. Not that she wished for those years back, or regretted the present. Regretted the years that had passed. Yes, that was it. She lit a cigarette. ‘You’re awfully subdued,’ Emily noted. She couldn’t say that she was weighing her life, tallying up what was lost, missed, forgotten. The mood had come on her suddenly, would pass like a summer storm. ‘Just thinking,’ she said. ‘My feet are killing me,’ Emily said. ‘Mine too.’” All the characters in Wish You Were Here practice the avoidance of conversation that would lead to read understanding or breakthrough. Each character suffers, often in silence. As O’Nan comments through one character, “The danger of vacation, she thought, was having too much time to think.” Reading Wish You Were Here on your vacation will ensure you’ll have a better time than O’Nan’s characters at Chautauqua. Steve Hopkins, May 22, 2002
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