By J.E.
Several weeks ago, I mentioned the fact that I was getting a bit tired of plowing my way through Agatha Christie’s books in chronological order, so I decided to shake things up and read something different for a change. At first I wanted to give A Passage to India another try (I haven’t read it since high school), but I found that to be pretty slow-going. While I am still reading a few pages per day from that book, I spent the bulk of my free reading time on All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve.
I’ve read three Shreve books prior to this one, and liked all of them, so I figured All He Ever Wanted would be a good bet. This particular novel was published in 2004, and, like most of Shreve’s other works, was a “national bestseller.” Other than that, however, I knew nothing of the book prior to sitting down to read it. I didn’t know what the plot was about, I didn’t know what professional critics had said about the book, and I didn’t know how regular readers reacted to it — which was good, because it allowed me to form my own uncolored opinions about the novel. So here’s my review.
Plot summary (with possible spoilers): All He Ever Wanted is narrated in the form of a flashback by a man named Nicholas Van Tassel. He is traveling by train to his sister’s funeral, and is writing out the story of his marriage as a sort of confessional for his son. The main events take place some 30 years before (this could be wrong; I’m so bad with keeping dates straight!) in a small New Hampshire town called Thrupp, and deal with the actions of Van Tassel and his wife, Etna.
Van Tassel’s memoir starts with a flashback to the very first night that he saw Etna Bliss. He was dining alone in a hotel when a sudden kitchen fire forced all the patrons out to the street. That’s where he caught sight of Etna for the very first time, as she was standing on the corner with her aunt and a small child. Nicholas was entranced by the woman, not because she was a great beauty (she wasn’t, exactly) but because there was a certain quality about her that drew him in.
Van Tassel offers to share a cab with Etna and her group, which they willingly accept. He’s surprised to discover that she’s staying with a colleague of his, one of the other professors at Thrupp College. After that, Van Tassel creates many excuses for stopping by the house for tea, and eventually works up the nerve to ask Etna out on a date. Although it’s clear that Etna isn’t swept away by Nicholas, she accepts.
During the courtship, Nicholas becomes increasingly obsessed by Etna. He can’t bear to be apart from her and can’t imagine trying to live his life without her — even though he knows that she doesn’t feel the same way about him. He asks Etna to marry him, and waits breathlessly for her answer. She reluctantly agrees (apparently she had no other prospects in a town as small as Thrupp).
The marriage gets off to a rocky start when Nicholas realizes on his wedding night that he’s not the first lover Etna has ever had. He wants to say something to her, to bring his suspicions out into the open, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he tortures himself with questions of what Etna’s life before him was like. It doesn’t help matters that Etna remains completely cold to him after they’re married. She barely speaks to him or acknowledges his presence in the house, and sleeps with him only out of a sense of duty. After they have children, Etna withdraws even more and focuses all her energy on the kids.
This is the basic framework of the marriage, and the rest of the novel takes us through a few specific episodes that highlight what a terribly jealous person Nicholas is and the lengths that he was willing to go to in order to keep Etna close to him. He eventually does receive confirmation that Etna had a previous lover, and when he realizes that she’s perhaps on the brink of taking another one, he commits an act so heinous that it made me wonder what Etna ever saw in him.
There is also a running subplot about Nicholas’s career at the college and the constant office politics that he’s involved in over there.
My Reaction: To get right to the point, I didn’t like this novel at all. I hate it when authors thrust a thoroughly unlikeable narrator on readers, and that’s precisely what Nicholas Van Tassel was. He didn’t have a single redeeming quality about him, which made reading All He Ever Wanted a tiresome chore rather than an enjoyable escape. I was much more interested in Etna than I was in Nicholas, and didn’t like that she was such a distant, unreachable character for most of the novel. I get that Shreve was showing us exactly how Nicholas saw Etna, but still… it just didn’t make for an engrossing reading experience.
Furthermore, I could have done without all the political maneuvering at the college. I felt that those interludes slowed an already snail’s-paced book down even more and made it so that I could barely get through 5 pages in a single sitting because it was so boring.
Needless to say, I was quite disappointed with All He Ever Wanted, and give it just 3.5 stars out of 10. I believe that this book was not representative of Shreve’s work, so I’ll continue to read her novels in the future; but this one was definitely a misstep.
