I've read it (and it's nothing like the movie).
I wrote this about it in my blog in August 2006:
Oh, yes. Here’s something I wanted to mention: I sat up until three this morning to finish reading
Evening by Susan Minot. It is a gorgeous work of art and I am really ticked because it is exactly the way I wanted my novel to be, but I listened to all the critics who insisted I follow the rules. Minot breaks nearly all of them. She uses no quotation marks whatsoever. Some sentences don’t even end in periods. It’s full of passive sentences and the use of “was.” She even has the protagonist get "out" of a guy's lap and sit "in" a chair. Not the kind of cushy chair a person can sink into, but a kitchen chair. The same word is often repeated in the same sentence or the same paragraph. The effect is ethereal. It won an award (can’t find the specific one at this moment, sorry) and got rave reviews, which were well deserved, in my humble opinion.
The story is about a sixty-five year old woman who is dying of cancer and the memory of a single weekend in which she found and lost the love of her life forty-years before, and the shadow it cast over the rest of her life, in spite of three marriages and five children. Agent: Goerges Borchardt Editor: Jordan Pavlin Paperback Publisher: Vintage Books, a division of Random House Hardback Publisher: Knopf, 1998.
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Since that time, I read something, somewhere, about how Minot dedicated the book to all the various places she sat when she was writing, or maybe they were places that had inspired her, and how self-indulgent and weird that was. I tend to agree in that regard.
