All He Ever Wanted (Paperback)

Anita Shreve's All He Ever Wanted reads like Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own told from the perspective of the husband. The wife gains a measure of freedom, but how does the repressive, abandoned husband feel about that freedom? Set in the early 1900s in the fictional New England college town of Thrupp, and narrated by the pompous Nicholas Van Tassel, All He Ever Wanted is at once an academic satire, a period novel, and a tale of suspense. Shreve's ability to nimbly hop through genres brings a liveliness to this story of love gone depressingly wrong. Van Tassel is an undistinguished professor of rhetoric at Thrupp College and a confirmed bachelor when he meets--in no less flamy a scenario than a hotel fire--the arresting Miss Etna Bliss. Immediately smitten, he woos and wins her. At least, he persuades her to become his wife. But Van Tassel hasn't really won her. Etna keeps her secrets and her feelings to herself. The extent of her withholding only becomes clear after a couple of kids and a decade or so of marriage. Then we find out that she's been creating a secret haven for herself all along. Van Tassel is in turn revealed--through his own priggish, puffed-up sentences--as something of a monster. The book is cleverly done; watching Etna through Van Tassel's eyes is like looking at beautiful bird from a hungry cat's point of view. But Van Tassel's voice might be too well written; he's pedantic and dull and snarky all at once, and by the end we find that we, like Etna, can't bear his company a minute longer. --Claire Dederer --Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.

In bestsellers such as Fortune's Rocks, Shreve has revealed an impeccably sharp eye and a generous emotional sensitivity in describing the moment when a man and a woman become infatuated with each. She is less successful this time out, perhaps because the epiphany is one-sided. Escaping from a New Hampshire hotel fire at the turn of the 20th century, Prof. Nicholas Van Tassel catches sight of Etna Bliss and is instantly smitten. She does not reciprocate his feeling, for she has her own unrequited lust, for freedom and independence. That they marry guarantees tragedy. Nicholas tells the story in retrospect, writing feverishly on a train trip in 1933 to his sister's funeral in Florida. His pedantic style is full of parenthetical asides, portentous foreshadowing and rhetorical throat. His erotic swoon commands sympathy, until it carries him past any definition of decency. He will do anything to bring down Philip Asher, his academic rival and the brother of Etna's true love, Samuel. He plays on prevailing anti-Semitism (the Ashers are Jewish), and he persuades his daughter, Clara, to claim that Philip touched her improperly, which besmirches not only Philip's reputation but Clara's as well. We see Etna herself only secondhand, except for some correspondence with Philip reproduced toward the end of the tale. Credit the author for making the point that Etna and her sisters had too little autonomy even to tell their own stories, but filtering Etna's experience through Nicholas's sensibility deprives the novel of intimacy and immediacy.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.

Set at the turn of the last century, like Fortune's Rocks, this work begins when a man fleeing a hotel fire encounters a mysterious woman who will ultimately become his wife.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte provient de la Hardcover édition.

Anita Shreve returns to New England for another look into the lives of men and women in the early twentieth century. Nicholas Van Tassel is writing his memoir of a life centered around Etna Bliss, a woman whose love remained elusive even after their marriage many years earlier. Dennis Boutsikaris is masterful as the voice of Professor Van Tassel, portraying the character as he is: insecure, arrogant, and blindly devoted all at once. Like the heroine in Shreve's Fortune's Rocks, Etna is a woman oppressed by the times in which she lives; these restrictions inevitably lead to conflict and bewilderment. Shreve writes with masterful description and is capable of taking the listener back in time. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.

Boldly plotted and inventively told, Shreve's latest novel is further proof that she is a natural-born storyteller with a shrewd sense of how to shape her material to best appeal to the commercial market. This is a story of obsessive love spanning the years 1899-1916 and told in the somewhat stilted and formal language of a pompous English professor. Nicholas Van Tassel first meets Etna Bliss while escaping from a hotel fire, a conflagration that serves to foreshadow their relationship. He pursues her relentlessly, ascertaining that she is financially dependent on her sister's family. Sensing her restlessness, he proposes marriage, deceiving himself about her feelings for him. The bargain they have struck comes back to haunt them when Nicholas discovers that his wife, unbeknownst to him, has inherited a painting, sold it, and used the proceeds to buy herself a small house, where she can find some small measure of freedom. Considering this act the height of betrayal, Nicholas sets in motion a series of disastrous events. Shreve artfully explores the gamut of emotions provoked by passion, from selfless generosity to base pettiness, subtly tracing the bargains people make and the price exacted, all in the name of love. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.

"A marriage is always two intersecting stories." This realization comes perhaps too late to the husband of Etna Bliss-a man whose obsession with his young wife begins at the moment of their first meeting, as he helps Etna and her companions escape from a fire in a hotel restaurant, and culminates in a marriage doomed by secrets and betrayal. Written with the intelligence and grace that are the hallmarks of Anita Shreve's bestselling novels, this gripping tale of desire, jealousy, and loss is peopled by unforgettable characters as real as the emotions that bring them together.