I’m not a person who talks to books but when I reached the lovely final lines of “The Evening Shades,” I couldn’t shut up, apparently. The words I said — gasped, if I’m honest — were, “Oh, my gosh.”
Lee Martin’s book — which may remind you of the small-town mini-dramas of Kent Haruf (“Plainsong”) and Ron Rash (“The Caretaker”) — shifts among the points of view of several characters in fictitious Mount Gilead, Ill., and Tower Hill, Ind. Set in 1972, the novel proceeds with glass-like smoothness but it’s actually trickier than it seems.
Without drawing attention to the structure, Martin sets the book up so the various narrators know they’re addressing us. They take turns telling their bits of the story (there are even first-person-plural chapters, which leave the ominous sense that the entire town of Tower Hill has made its mind up about what to think of something). They pick up the story from each other and amplify incidents that were described by previous narrators. It’s as if we’re sitting in a folksy town hall, with the narrators arrayed in front of us, taking a turn to win us over to their version of the story.
The plot is a classic: the stranger who comes to town and changes everything. He’s Henry Dees, also a central character in Martin’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, “The Bright Forever.”
A math teacher, Henry seems like a decent sort when he arrives in Mount Gilead but he immediately hints at disturbing undercurrents: a friendship with a girl in Tower Hill that resulted in his decision to skip town, a new bond with Mount Gilead’s Edith Green that develops too quickly, references to an acquaintance who disappeared and may be dead. “The Evening Shades” is not a thriller but, as it becomes clear how many lives are being sucked into Dees' tale, it begins to feel like one.
In part, that’s because the competing narratives in “The Evening Shades” constantly remind us that one person’s happy-ever-after is another person’s doom. “We gave each other the gift of our listening,” Edith Green tells us but, behind that sweet turn of phrase, we’re wondering about the man who asked her out before Henry came to town and who still seethes at her polite refusal. A good deal of “The Evening Shades” is about a loneliness that it’s clear can only be eased for a few characters.
The precariousness of being a human, wishing for happiness, also is a theme of the book. Henry is hopeful about his new town but events in his previous town pull him back: “I’d close my eyes a moment and imagine that indeed there was a place — call it Heaven, if you want — and someday I’d go there and never again be a man with secrets and sins and an imperfect life lived outside the bright forever."
Re-reading that sentence, I’m surprised it took me so long to start talking to “The Evening Shades.” It’s filled with beautiful, exclamation-worthy language: “If you’re like me, you know early on you’re the X, the unknown, and you spend your life trying to solve the mystery of yourself because you know no one else will ever try.”
