Too Close to Home

Emily, Alone a novel by Stewart O’Nan.  Penguin Books. 255 pp. $17.00

I picked up this book because a friend of my brother told him it was set in “our Pittsburgh.”  I couldn’t believe the extent to which that is true.  The aging widow Emily Maxwell does not live quite in my neighborhood, but close enough, and she frequents all the same haunts I did, Oakland (the university neighborhood), Squirrel Hill, Shadyside; she shops at the Giant Eagle and listens to classical music on QED.  She attends Calvary Episcopal Church, which I once attended with a friend. She vacations at Chataqua, where another friend took me for a visit.  She even—when her family lets her down for the holidays—goes to the Golf Club for Thanksgiving dinner.

This is very much the Pittsburgh, not quite of the family I was born into—my father, a physician, rebelled against the Pittsburgh establishment—but of my step family, which my mother married into after being a widow for eighteen years.  Suddenly she not only belonged to the Golf Club, but lived within walking distance of it (and right down the hall from Mr. Rogers).  Her husband, who was retired, regularly took the bus to the “downtown eating clubs” (meaning the Duquesne Club) that my father scorned.  I well remember when I first attended Shady Side Academy and a friend asked, “Which does your family belong to, the University Club or the PAA?”  I was stumped by the question.  “Neither one,” I said.

My stepfather belonged to both.

He was a lover of Pittsburgh and its history, loved in particular the landmark society; when he first married my mother, he would drive us around Pittsburgh telling us who had lived in all the famous houses.  These were people he had known.  Sometimes, to our astonishment, he drove right into their driveway so we could get a better look.  “They won’t mind at all,” he’d say.

I wasn’t so sure.

Stewart O’Nan also grew up in Pittsburgh, and is twelve years younger than I.  This novel is about his parents’ generation; Emily is an aging widow who still lives in the house that she occupied with her husband and two children.  She knows the neighbors around her, but they are all new, and she more vividly remembers the people who used to live there.  Her husband and most of her friends have died; the only person she’s still close to is her sister in law Arlene.  The two women don’t live together but socialize almost every day; the novel opens with their Tuesday routine, when they visit Eat ‘N Park for the bargain breakfast buffet.[1]  They have the same kind of routines and annoyances with each other that an old married couple has.  They might as well be married.

This then is a skilled novelist imagining the life of a person very much different from him, but nevertheless of his world.  And I have to say that, as far as I can tell, he gets every detail right.  Everything Emily does, what she reads, how she spends her day: it all rings true.  This is the life of an aging woman whose children now have grown children: everyone loves each other, but they also all have their own lives.  She notices various slights—how soon they call her on Mother’s Day, when (if ever) they send thank you notes at Christmas—and wonders at their failures.  She had similar issues with her own mother.  Life has passed Emily by, but in a completely natural way.  The younger people have their concerns, and she’s out of the mix.  She’s not waiting to die, exactly, but she’s not quite living either.

And while I sympathized with her plight, I also found myself slightly annoyed.  This, for one thing, is very much a white upper middle class world; lots of people face old age without her advantages.  When she finally decides her husband’s mammoth Oldsmobile isn’t practical, she writes a check for a new car at the blink of an eye (and should have done it years before).  Yes, Arlene can be a pain in the butt, but who says she has to confine herself to one friend?  There’s a whole world out there, and the culture that surrounds her is rich.  My 73-year-old brother lives in Pittsburgh and doesn’t have any trouble keeping himself amused.  He too attends church but also teaches a class there, and knows many people in the congregation.  He also knows the world of Pittsburgh music lovers, which is vast.  And he walks in his neighborhood every day.  Emily is still ambulatory.  She doesn’t have to spend afternoons wrapped in an afghan reading her book.

There’s a sadness to Emily’s situation to be sure, but it shouldn’t all be sad.  The small joys of life are the most dependable.

She could start by going to Pamela’s for breakfast instead of Eat ‘N Park.

[1] This was another iconic Pittsburgh institution, but I only ate there for New Years Day breakfast, when my wife and I were leaving the city and no place else was open.  The only way I would atten a bargain breakfast buffet there is with a gun at my head.