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Summary: A departure for her
Review: This book was a bit of a departure for Shreve, a little different from her usual novels, but I liked it. I didn't like it as much as Sea Glass or Fortunes Rocks, but it was still a good read. I guess the main thing was that the main character & narrator was a man. Plus, he's from late 1800's, early 1900's.
Whatever she writes though, it's a book I pick up and can't put down until I've finished it.
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Summary: Nicholas Speaks. . .
Review: ALL HE EVER WANTED was a surprise for me in that before I started to read it I didn't know it was a period piece, so to speak. Nicholas Van Tassel is a stuffy professor at a small college in New Hampshire in the early 1900s. His stuffiness, at first, rubbed me the wrong way. But I've been pleased with Anita Shreve's past books and was determined to keep going, despite this. It was also a little difficult to get used to the way the book is written. The stilted words as Nicholas tells the story of falling in love with Etna and their life together was an initial drawback, but after the first 40 or 50 pages, I was at ease with it. This is a sad tale. A man who only wanted a few choice things in his life, Nicholas has a way of screwing those things up so that even if he gets them, it doesn't make him happy. He's not a particularly likable fellow although there are certain things about him that make you at least understand him. It was somewhat refreshing not to have to read about a perfect person since so few of those exist in real life! I enjoyed reading this book and was pleased with the skill used in telling the story. Anita Shreve gets my vote for a job well done.
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Summary: Pompous Boring Nonesense
Review: The plot is so thin- the rhetoric so poor that I wish I'd never opened this latest disappointment from Ms. Shreve. If you want to truly enjoy her talent as a writer search out and read her earliest works."Strange Fits of Passion" and "Resistance" are examples of breathtaking fiction. Un-put-downable!! This is just not up to that standard, nor was 'Since Last We Met' which was so contrived that I was furious for days ! I hope she reverts to her earlier style at which she succeeds brilliantly.
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Summary: Marrying for the wrong reasons leads to sorrow.
Review: In her previous novels, Anita Shreve has tackled the thorny subject of how men and women often operate at cross-purposes. In "All He Ever Wanted," Shreve writes from the point of view of a man, Nicholas Van Tassel, who is a college teacher in a small New Hampshire town in 1899. Van Tassel, by chance, encounters a young woman with the unlikely name of Etna Bliss, and he is immediately smitten with her. Van Tassel refuses to listen when Etna insists that she can never reciprocate his love, and he asks her to marry him. This decision will come back to haunt him. Shreve chose unwisely when she decided to write the book from Nicholas's point of view. He is a pompous, selfish, and shortsighted individual, who for much of the book is blind to his own shortcomings. He makes an unreliable and irritating narrator. The author should have told the book from Etna's point of view, for she is by far the most interesting character in the book. We learn little about Etna's inner life, and what we learn is told from Nicholas's skewed viewpoint. We do find out that Etna has a secret and tumultuous past, one that she chooses not to share with her husband. Nicholas, who is a pompous chauvinist, does not sympathize with his wife and his clumsy efforts to control her behavior inevitably backfire. Shreve's narrative style is occasionally heavy-handed and overwrought in this novel, and her lack of subtlety weakens the book. What keeps me interested in reading Shreve's novels is her compassion for her characters. Both Nicholas and Etna are stuck in certain roles, and neither one is flexible enough to change. Since these two individuals are so different from one another, and so lacking in any understanding of one another's needs, their relationship can only bring heartbreak. Anita Shreve has always been an expert at expressing the sorrow of unhappily married couples.
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Summary: Soames Forsyte meet Nicholas Van Tassel
Review: One wonders if Anita Shreve was influenced by the recent revival of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga. (Surely, writer that she is, she has read Galworthy. Everyone should.) For Nicholas seems just as obsessed with Etna as Soames is with Irene. Of course, the stilted language that Shreve executes in Nicholas' narrative makes the tale quite a period piece. But she doesn't have the gift of Galsworthy. Unrequited love, a great universal theme, makes one feel a bit of disgust for Nicholas the smitten professor. His social status certainly doesn't smack of a Forsyte, but his desire for a governess of pecuniary embarrassment certainly does mimic Soames' obsession with a poor piano teacher, both at the mercy of a dead father's poor estate. I enjoyed Shreve's period piece Fortune Rocks much more than this new tome. But this book will probably please those who like a good romance with a twist, a Shreve specialty.
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Summary: Another great obsessive love story
Review: I became an Anita Shreve fan ever since I read "The Last Time They Met" and I was excited to see that she had a new book out. I couldn't wait to read how she would show the tragedy that can sometimes come from loving someone intensely to the point of obsession. She always writes with such graceful intensely making me feel Nicholas's pain from Etna's coldness and still loving her though unrequited. At the same time, however, I felt like beating Nicholas over the head with the message "Etna doesn't love you nor she ever will." I can't wait for her next book.
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Summary: Anita Shreve rocks!
Review: Anita Shreve just can't seem to write a bad book.
In All He Ever Wanted, her tale concerns unrequited love, the results of the somewhat unlikely 'love at first sight.' Maybe this was more commn in the early 20th century, the era in which this book is set, but it was the only part of the tale that stretched my credulity. The story covers a lot of ground: anti-Semitism, ... abuse, women's rights, and academia.
If you liked Shreves' other books, you won't be disappointed by this one.
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Summary: Shreve has a winner
Review: Having read all of Shreve's books, I think this is one of the best. Although we know that men fall in love and marry using only their sense of sight, this is pathetic. How this book shows obsession to its fullest power.
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Summary: Slow start, self-absorbed man, why bother...
Review: I have read all of Ms Shreve's novels and have completed each feeling as if I have learned something new; about her writing, how the world works from her perspective, and sometimes a fresh awe as to how she can capture the heart. This latest effort is a disappointment on all fronts: The central character (speaking during the late 1800's, proper jargon and all), is selfish in most aspects that the word is defined. He is out for only himself, and damned anyone that get's in his way. This is an old subject with old and familiar twists. I didn't sit on the edge of my seat while reading Ms. Shreve's latest, but instead predicted the end, and was disappointed coming out correct in my assumption.
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Summary: Shreve once again proves her place as a bestselling author
Review: Now in his senior years, Nicholas Van Tassel travels on a train from New England to Florida for the burial of his sister, while writing the memoirs of his ruined life. He begins years earlier with the fire --- the fire that would set his fate. As crowds escape a hotel blaze, Van Tassel spots a riveting woman under a lamppost. "There was about her a quality of stillness that was undeniably arresting, and if I close my eyes now," he recalls, "here in this racketing compartment, I can travel back in time more than three decades and see her unmoving form amidst the nearly hysterical crowd." From the start, Shreve sets up the initial sighting of Etna Bliss as something beyond normal attraction. Van Tassel tells us "my desire for this unknown woman was so immediate and keen and inappropriate that it quite startled me." In hindsight, Van Tassel describes his passion as capable of eroding and enhancing character --- in equal measure --- and yet it is the sentence about erosion that is most telling of things to come: "The erosion the result of the willingness to do whatever is necessary to obtain the object of one's desire, even if it means engaging in lies or deception or debasing what was once treasured." Enamored, Van Tassel pursues the aloof Etna immediately and with vigor. He ingratiates his way into her life, which is easy to do in the small quiet town where he has made his life and where there is little else to entertain or distract Etna. A seemingly harmless type --- professorial by vocation and character --- he is, by his own account, loyal and disciplined, even, ironically, when visiting the less savory neighborhood of Springfield, Massachusetts for trysts with women of some reputation. Etna proves to be a formidable mystery, but Van Tassel, who is obsessed, perseveres. They ultimately wed and have children, but Etna remains distant and impenetrable, and Van Tassel suspects that she has known love before him, though he dare not ask. Instead, he lets his jealousy fester. Eventually Etna's past comes to light and collides with Van Tassel's need to totally possess her. A grand scale betrayal ensues, wreaking destruction and devastation on all involved. Shreve peppers the story with the telltale detail she has come to be known for. Set in the last 19th and early 20th centuries, Van Tassel and Ms. Bliss engage in a proper courtship of afternoon teas, walks in the park and the exchange of books. All the while Van Tassel's desire grows, consumes and seethes below the surface. Shreve is one of those rare great authors who is equally at ease writing about any period. One sees the clothes, the furniture and the architecture in lively, captivating detail. Even in sharing his want, Shreve shows the reserve appropriate of the time: "Had it been at all within the realm of possibility, I would have crossed the distance between us and forced her face to mine. I would have dug my hand into the small of her back so that she was pressed hard against me. I would have lifted her skirts and run my hand along her thigh and tucked my fingers into her stocking. I would have done all those things, and perhaps she saw this, for she drew herself together in an instant, as if she had plunged her wrists into icy water. Of course, I did nothing, but I cannot help but wonder what might have happened between us had I been bold enough to touch her then." Such restraint is palpably evident throughout the book --- and rightly so. It is the tenor of the time and Shreve is a master of time. The acclaimed talents evident in WEIGHT OF WATER, THE PILOT'S WIFE and Shreve's other works are on full display in ALL HE EVER WANTED. She takes us to another time period with evocative language, in a rich and complex story. Shreve plumbs the depth of desire and love and jealousy in intimate and immediate detail, once again proving her place as a bestselling author. --- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara
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