All He Ever Wanted
 Anita Shreve
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 2003 Little, Brown & Co.
 ISBN: 0316782262

A man escaping from a hotel fire sees a woman standing nearby & his life is changed.

Set about a hundred years ago, before WWI, Nicholaas Van Tassel is traveling by train to a sad reunion in Florida. He is determined to set down “evidence...that I once passed this way...” (P. 296) & all the strange fury & passion that altered his orderly (read: physically & emotionally numb), irreproachable (read: bigoted & prejudiced) academic life.

Mr. Van Tassel, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud & a professor at the Thrupp University in New England, is a learned, & engagingly pompous gentleman stirred by a “desire” which he attempts to rationalize, & which simply turned his world upside-down & inside-out...hearing only what he wanted, seeing only what he expected.

All He Ever Wanted was to fulfill the passion which came upon him during the extremis of surviving that fire, what he got instead were lessons in seduction, expectations & morality, which he never quite learned. Instead of his wedding night being a venue for marital bliss, it became a pit of his own making into which he fell in a self-righteous fit of jealousy...& lies. What he got...was a life, with a wife he didn't know, & wouldn't understand.

Who was Etna Bliss? What had been her life before he met her? For all his book learning, Mr. Van Tassel struggles to comprehend, not because he values the woman, only because of his “love” (read: obession) for his wife. He is, however, a product of his time, & most of the early 20th century's morality & prejudices come alive within these pages.

All He Ever Wanted is a time capsule of how the male of the species thought about gender, duty, sex, love, women & children. It's as if Anita Shreve, upon reading Three Contributions To the Theory of Sex for the first time, discovered a story within. It begs the questions: What is the difference between lust & love? Biology & affection. Forgiveness & trust.

& what of a woman's freedom...to do with her life as she see fit? To have a retreat from the smothering of marital concourse? What of the double standard that permits a man his preferences without reprecussion, & a woman who does the same to be called into question?

What ghastly webs our lies weave...lies of omission as much as invention.

If you like your stories couched in old-fashioned language; if you want to get inside a man's mind & see the world through his eyes, you are going to like All He Ever Wanted -- it is enlightening & sad. It made me so mad & glad we've come a long way from those times, although I know there are whole cultures who keep these thoughts & morals alive.

In a political aside: Anita Shreve has written a fascinating study of how a man of that particular era, class & education would have thought. After all the books written by men about how women think, All He Ever Wanted is actually a refreshing, if predictable, cold shower! Got me re-thinking about the transformation of morality during the last 100 years, & the roots of women's suffrage & liberation.

Well done!

More from Anita Shreve:
Sea Glass
The Last Time They Met
The Pilot's Wife
Fortune's Rocks
The Weight of Water
Strange Fits of Passion & many more!
(07/27/03)

Rebecca