Henry, Himself

June 3, 2019
O’Nan’s elegiac companion piece to his 2011 novel, Emily, Alone, follows Emily’s husband of 49 years, Henry Maxwell, who, at 75, suffers from variety of physical ailments. The year is 1998 and readers follow Henry and his family from Valentine’s Day to New Year’s Eve as they celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, observe annual traditions, and spend the summer by the lake. Henry and Emily grapple with their two adult children, Margaret and Kenny, their respective spouses, Jeff and Lisa, and their grandchildren. Nothing especially dramatic happens, except, maybe, when Margaret, who is a recovering alcoholic, gets into an accident right before Thanksgiving and Emily rushes to be with her, leaving Henry to serve the holiday feast to the rest of his family on his own. A member of the “Greatest Generation,” Henry deals with his own growing sense of mortality, but he does it with a rare grace that endears him to the reader. The author evokes Henry’s middle-class Pittsburgh existence like a Keystone State Joyce. One would have to go back to Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge to find a literary marriage bookended in such a perceptive fashion.

April 1, 2019
In this prequel to Emily, Alone (2011), O'Nan returns to his hometown of Pittsburgh and to his Maxwell family cycle with a charming, meditative, gently funny, and stealthily poignant portrait of Emily's husband, Henry. A WWII veteran trying to make sense of life in 1998, Henry is a retired engineer who loves to fix things and asserts his freedom to putter. But beneath his serenity and affability, he is secretly haunted by harrowing war memories, fully aware of his �shortcomings?especially his inability to understand his daughter, Margaret, who struggles with addiction and a faltering �marriage?and rueful about the diminishments of age. Henry is also a persistent romantic, still courting acerbic, pragmatic Emily. O'Nan elevates the routines and chores of quiet domesticity to a nearly heroic level in his lingering attention to details, from plumbing troubles to coupons, walking the dog, and all the preparations and disruptions of holiday gatherings. Like Richard Russo and Anne Tyler, O'Nan discerningly celebrates the glory of the ordinary in this pitch-perfect tale of the hidden everyday valor of a humble and good man.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2018

A Granta Best of Young American Novelists, O'Nan (Last Night at the Lobster, City of Secrets) presents Henry Maxwell, retired at 75 after having worked as an engineer and a committed husband, father, and churchgoer who has always espoused hard work and sacrifice. But in a more self-involved world, with his memory wandering and his children at the borders of his life, he begins rethinking his life, wondering not so much whether he has done well but whether he has done good.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2019
The husband and father whose death haunted two previous novels about the Maxwell family (Wish You Were Here, 2002; Emily, Alone, 2011) speaks for himself in this moving third installment. The prolific and protean O'Nan (City of Secrets, 2016, etc.) has ranged with aplomb over many genres and locales, but his heart is most evidently engaged in the novels set in his native Pittsburgh. The city has been home to Henry Maxwell's family for generations, but his neighborhood is changing; there are supermarkets he doesn't like wife Emily shopping in alone, and the couple is shaken by reports of an assault-rifle attack on a nearby backyard party. The traditions that sustain and nourish Henry--weekly churchgoing, holiday charitable giving, the annual spring flower show, summers at their cottage by the lake in Chautauqua--seem to be cherished only by a dwindling band of elderly folks like himself. As the novel progresses through the year 1998, O'Nan poignantly captures Henry's sense of loss and diminishment--he is 74 and overweight with bad cholesterol--while tenderly evoking his enduring love for prickly Emily, his devotion to their two children and four grandchildren, and the pleasure this retired engineer takes in puttering in the garage and tending to the house. Memories of his past are deftly interpolated to illuminate the childhood and wartime experiences that shaped a quiet, slightly distant man who dislikes conflict. Several flashbacks to World War II are particularly notable for the delicacy with which O'Nan unfolds the lasting impact of Henry's combat experiences. As usual, this profoundly unpretentious writer employs lucid, no-frills prose to cogently convey complicated emotions and fraught family interactions. The novel makes no claims for Henry or his kin as exceptional people but instead celebrates the fullness and uniqueness of each ordinary human being. Astute and tender, rich in lovely images and revealing details--another wonderful piece of work from the immensely gifted O'Nan.

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