Wish You Were Here

Rating:
Summary: Half as Long, Twice as Good?
Review: As others have mentioned, wonderful characterizations, the writing is good, but there is no story. I love good character development and detail to surroundings, but these elements should be integrated into some kind of story-line, and THERE ISN'T ONE! What a waste of my time (and money!).

Rating:
Summary: Character driven novel about ongoing dysfunction
Review: I can not speak for anyone but myself when I say that I found this book missing something. I checked it out of the library solely on the level of seeing different generations interact. I did see that in this book, but found most of them, save maybe Arlene, amazingly dull and shallow. I wonder if the writer would have been better off to focus on a smaller group, really getting to their deepest levels.
I found myself becoming infuriated by the characters inability to say how they really feel. The dysfunction continues in this family because no one is willing to say what is bothering them, from the mother, to the alcoholic daughter, to the bitter wife. There is no conclusion in this book....just stories hanging in the wind.

Rating:
Summary: Character driven novel about ongoing dysfunction
Review: I can not speak for anyone but myself when I say that I found this book missing something. I checked it out of the library solely on the level of seeing different generations interact. I did see that in this book, but found most of them, save maybe Arlene, amazingly dull and shallow. I wonder if the writer would have been better off to focus on a smaller group, really getting to their deepest levels.
I found myself becoming infuriated by the characters inability to say how they really feel. The dysfunction continues in this family because no one is willing to say what is bothering them, from the mother, to the alcoholic daughter, to the bitter wife. There is no conclusion in this book....just stories hanging in the wind.

Rating:
Summary: Big Disappointing Yawn........
Review: I was looking so forward to reading this BIG book by Stewart O'Nan..I think he is a wonderful story teller. However, I prefer his slim, elegant and minimalistic novels (almost novellas) to this big old book about nothing going on...just goes on and on and on and on and I am simply bored with it. I am disappointed...I think he bit off more than he could chew. The characters are lackluster, one dimensional and inspired nothing but apathy from me. Another one bites the dust....I am not finishing this one.

Rating:
Summary: What A Fantastic Story
Review: If you like character driven stories, then you will enjoy this book. Stewart O'Nan brings such life and personality to the characters in this story that you will feel like you are part of their family and sitting right there with them before you finish the book. If you like books that are action packed and suspenseful, then this is NOT a book for you. On the other hand, if you want to read something with substance that you can really sink your teeth into, then this is a MUST read. A very enjoyable story of family, difficult situations and real life.

Rating:
Summary: Complex and accurate family portrait
Review: Stewart O'Nan has done here--successfully--what one of the members of the family he portrays longs to do as a photographic work: he captures the summer world of Lake Chautauqua, where time moves slowly and every change seems a betrayal of memory, rather than a step in progress. But this only the setting; the true stars of this drama are the family. O'Nan examines its web of relationships, politics and attitudes with an uncannily accurate eye. He assumes each character's point of view lovingly; he knows them all, young and old, male and female. And so do we, because we've been there ourselves--the recognition is half the fun of the reading. The detail, too, is marvelous: whose workbench, for example, has never been graced with a Chock-Full-O-Nuts can crammed with dead paintbrushes? Wish You Were Here reminds us what a flawed species we are, so eager to turn away from each other to search for that Something that must, by nature, elude us--the perfect light, the impossible love, the exquisite memory, the undiluted attention of our parents. There are no jarring plot twists, no car chases, no fights-to-the-death, no special effects--just fine writing, arresting characters, right-on dialogue (spoken and internal) and a week's crash course in what makes us bizarre creatures tick. Read; recognize; enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: Rufus speaks
Review: The book captured me -- primarily because of the shifting points of view. Alone with Emily in her thoughts, I liked her and felt compassion for her. From Lise's point of view, I saw only a bitter mother-in-law. Which only made me feel compassion for BOTH of them, and the huge space between them neither seemed emotionally skilled enough to cross.

So rather than finding flat, dull, unlikable characters, as some other reviewers have, I found multidimensional characters with main themes they couldn't -- despite themselves -- shake. Is there love in this family? More on Friday and Saturday of the long week, even more in the recollections. Life is like that. I mean c'mon -- Aunt Arlene pitching the wiffle ball to Sammy "Whammy Bammy" Maxwell like his grandfather once did? O'Nan gives you many, many moments such as this that resonate.

Should the kidnapped gas attendant have been found? Should a character have careened through a wild arc of growth and self-discovery? While some readers may want that, O'Nan doesn't give it -- and that's his perogative. It left me feeling as I often do in life -- searching.

I found the climax of the book to be release -- the open bathroom door one reviewer wrote about. Maybe loss filters through us physically. Finishing the book, I was reminded of the quote (by Thoreau, I believe) that most of us live lives of "quiet desperation."

Lots more to say, but I'll end with this -- didn't anyone else appreciate the short chapter written from the dog Rufus' point of view? I found the dog one of the most touching characters, oddly. How much easier it is to be our true selves with a nonjudgmental pet rather than those we love and fear at the same time.

Anyway -- four stars. Had to write a review to boost the ratings. O'Nan is too talented a stylist.

Rating:
Summary: Glad I WASN'T There!
Review: The title and back cover reviews of the book inspired me to buy it while on vacation. I anticipated a great book to read at the beach, but I was sadly mistaken. There wasn't much of a story line to follow and no real climax. The story was so painfully mundane I quit reading it, and left it behind in the hotel lobby when I came home.

Rating:
Summary: back to the library - unfinished
Review: wash windows, sweep floors, make beds, clean out closets, get bored with a visit to niagra, change gears, buy hamburgers, find lost screws (who ever lost a screw?)...

Rating:
Summary: 1/2 will hate it, some won't finish it, some love it
Review: Wish You Were Here details (and I mean details) the last week a family spends at their cottage in Chautauqua NY before it's sold by the recently widowed matriarch, Emily. O'Nan follows the various family dynamics, both entrenched (long-standing parent-child issues) and newly formed (recent divorce, budding adolescence), across three generations--Emily and her sister-in-law Arlene, Emily's two children Meg and Ken and her daughter-in-law Lisa, and finally the grandchildren, timid Justin, temptress Sarah, pain-in-the-butt boy Sam, and plain but smart Ella, who has a newly-awakened crush on her cousin Sarah. There are lots of issues to go around: Meg's divorce, recent alcohol rehab, money troubles, and deteriorating relationship with her kids; Ken's downward employment spiral, his flailing attempts at photography as an artistic career, his rough-edged marriage; Lisa's inability to connect with her mother-in-law and more recently her husband; Arlene's coming to terms with her age, her singleness, her lack of children, her resentment over the sale of the family cottage; Emily's difficult relationships with her children, sorrow over her dead husband, her sense of her own mortality, her sense of loss with the cottage. Throw in four on-the-cusp of adolescence children (two of them going through a rough divorce, one a possible breakup, and another a same-sex crush) and a missing neighborhood girl, and O'Nan lacks for little to cover.
And he covers it all. Wish You Were Here is kind of like the old joke--"I spent a week in Philly (or fill in your own city) one night". The pace is very slow, the lengthy book divided up by days in the single week covered and the detail is sometimes perhaps more than necessary (how many bathroom scenes does one book need?). It's easy to predict that many, in fact, will find the book too slow, too filled with mind-numbing detail. That many will not bother finishing it or hate the fact that they feel compelled to finish it.
If one accepts the slow, wandering pace, though, and lets the detail settle around like a fine mist rather than trying to slog through it like a field of waist-high weeds, the book is highly rewarding. Not for its plot, of which there is little. But for its sharp humanistic detail, its warm characterization, its vivid tiny moments that most of us would recognize from our own lives. At first, the characters seem pretty stock: bitter daughter-in-law, jealous sister, plain but smart teen girl, timid boy, etc. But as the book delves into each character, either through their own point-of-view, which shifts among them, or through other characters' insights about them, one starts to realize just how complex they are. They move beyond their surface roles and become fully fleshed characters, interacting through moments of pain, anger, sorrow, resentment, tedium, frustration and on and on through the panoply of emotions we all do on a daily basis. One feels for each of them, some more than others (Ella and Arlene stand out for me), but still for each. Each has his or her moment. Or more accurately, a string of them.
The book will certainly not be to everyone's taste. The pace is slow. The detail dense and cumulative. The ending anti-climatic. If you find yourself fighting your way through the first hundred pages, it's probably not worth the pain as it's more of the same. But if you find yourself settling in, smiling or wincing to yourself at something a character says, does, or thinks, then make yourself comfortable because you won't be coming up for a while. Strongly recommended.