Starting Out in the Evening (1998) by Brian Morton

 1,001 Novels:  A Library of America

Starting Out in the Evening (1998)

by Brian Morton

Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York

New York: 59/105

Manhattan: 15/34

  If there is one subject, artistically speaking, that I would happily exclude from future reading it would be relationships between much older men and much younger women, particularly those that take place between members of higher income/education socio-economic groups.  Haven't we all heard enough about 70 year old men fucking 20 or 30 something women?  It's sad, it's gross and there is so, so, so much of it out there already that a book like Starting Out in the Evening- which was made into a feature film a decade later, for pete's sake, now seems out of touch. 

  I'd never heard of Morton before this book- certainly I hadn't seen either of the movies that have been adapted from his books.  The story here is about a semi-succesful novelist- four novels over the course of a lifetime, two good ones and two not so good.  He's retired, living on the Upper West Side.  His daughter, Ariel is a mess- an-ex dancer who teaches housewives aerobics and spends way too much time thinking about her dad.  Enter Heather Wolfe an ambitious young writer-scholar, who wants to write about the novelist.  Spoiler alert, they fuck.   She writes a not-so-amazing thesis on the author (Schiller is his name) and then he has a stroke.  Ariel gets back together with her old boyfriend.  Can't imagine how this book made it onto the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, one of my least favorite books out of New York.