From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. O’Nan checks back in with the Maxwell family from Wish You Were Here in this bracingly unsentimental, ruefully humorous, and unsparingly candid novel about the emotional and physical travails of old age. At 80, widow Emily Maxwell has become dependent on her equally aged sister-in-law, Arlene, to chauffeur them to the rounds of Pittsburgh’s country club dinners, flower shows, museums, and increasingly frequent funerals. After Arlene has a stroke, Emily is forced into reclaiming her independence, but she remains clear-eyed about her diminishing future and what she can expect of her two adult children and four grandchildren, giving O’Nan the opportunity and space to expertly play out the misunderstandings, disagreements, and resentments among parents and their grown children. Emily fears saying the wrong things (yet often does) and frets about her grandchildren, who are uninterested in family traditions and lax with thank-you notes. The unhurried plot follows Emily from a lonely Thanksgiving with Arlene to a Christmas visit from her daughter 
and two grandchildren, Easter with her son and his children, and the eve of her summer departure to Chautauqua. During this time, friends and acquaintances die, Emily observes the deterioration of the neighborhoods she’s known for decades, and she continues to converse with her old dog, Rufus. Efficient, practical, stubborn, frugal, and a lover of crosswords, church services, and baroque music, the closely observed Emily is a sort of contemporary Mrs. Bridge, and O’Nan’s depiction of her attempts to sustain optimism and energy during the late stage of her life achieves a rare resonance.
On the surface, one wouldn’t call Stewart O’Nan’s latest novel, Emily, Alone, an obvious pageturner. Its heroine is the rather rigid Emily, 80-year-old widowed matriarch of the Maxwell clan that O’Nan explored in his 2002 domestic drama Wish You Were Here, and the narrative largely consists of her daily routine piddling away the hours in her Pittsburgh home. Yet there’s so much yearning in Emily — to like herself more, to forgive her own failings and those of her grown children and grandchildren, to wring something meaningful out of her final years. And O’Nan writes with such specificity and humor. On yet another friend’s memorial service: ”The room was windowless, the air warm and stagnant, and as Jamie read a long, gently comic remembrance of her mother’s love of weddings, Emily thought that she’d been to so many of these that she’d become a critic.”
The novel kicks off at the Eat ‘n Park’s two-for-one breakfast buffet, a weekly tradition for Emily and her always game sister-in-law Arlene. (May we all have an Arlene in our lives when we are old and alone.) Arlene suffers a stroke, whacking her forehead on the salad bar’s sneeze glass. It’s a terrifyingly vivid scene, one that nudges Emily out of her comfort zone. And so, in the period spanning Thanksgiving to her summer family holiday, Emily stretches for a kind of rediscovery. Throughout she is lovable and heartbreaking and real. When this novel ends, in a moment of great hope and vigor, you’ll find yourself missing her terribly. Rated – A
Filed under: Actors, Books, Meryl Streep, Movie roles, Movie roles over 50 Tagged: | Emily Alone, Meryl Streep, Movie Roles, Movies from Books
