All He Ever Wanted
by Anita Shreve
List Price: $14.95
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0316735736
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Anita Shreve began writing fiction while working as a high school teacher. Although one of her first published stories, "Past the Island, Drifting," was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975, Shreve felt she couldn't make a living as a fiction writer so she became a journalist. She traveled to Africa, and spent three years in Kenya, writing articles that appeared in magazines such as Quest, US, and Newsweek. Back in the United States, she turned to raising her children and writing freelance articles for magazines. Shreve later expanded two of these articles — both published in the New York Times Magazine — into the nonfiction books Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone. At the same time Shreve also began working on her first novel, Eden Close. With its publication in 1989, she gave up journalism for writing fiction full time, thrilled, as she says, with "the rush of freedom that I could make it up."
Since Eden Close Anita Shreve has written nine other novels: Strange Fits of Passion, Where or When, Resistance, The Weight of Water, The Pilot's Wife, Fortune's Rocks, The Last Time They Met, Sea Glass and, most recently All He Ever Wanted. In 1998 Shreve received the PEN/L. L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction.
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From Chandelier to Novel by Anita Shreve
All He Ever Wanted began with an image of a room -- a calm and peaceful room of bleached quiet. In this room were white hydrangeas, pale linen curtains knotted just below the sills, faded French floral studies stuck onto the walls with hat pins, and, in the center, a white chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The conceit of the chandelier, which was oversized for the room, was of a bouquet of white iron flowers, the rust poking through in patches, lending the blossoms a tinge of ruin. Through this thicket of flowers -- some daisies, some roses with sharp-edged petals -- the six sconces of the fixture spread out with open arms. All about the chandelier, hanging from the stems and leaves and vines of the sconces, were dozens of crystals.
So clear and immediate was this vision that my working title for the novel that spooled out from it was originally called "The White Chandelier." I saw, in this room, a woman sitting at a table. She was sewing, and then after that, she made tea. Then she read for a bit. And then she wrote a letter. No one knew about the room, and she had gone to great pains to achieve it. Indeed, one could say she had bartered away her life to have it. Why was it so important to her?
And from there, the novel began to take on a life of its own, creating a universe that answered this question and many others. I thought about writing the novel from the woman's point of view, but I chose instead to write it from the point of view of the man who loved her, who was, in fact, obsessed with her, and would have done anything for her short of letting her have her independence and this room. And why was that?
Voila! I had a plot.
I enjoyed creating the slightly fussy and pedantic voice of Nicholas Van Tassel, immersing myself in the era in which the novel takes place (1899-1933), and pondering the deep moral questions both Nicholas and his wife, Etna, have to answer. I hope you will have as much pleasure reading this book as I did writing it.
Excerpted from All He Ever Wanted © Copyright 2008 by Anita Shreve. Reprinted with permission by Back Bay Books. All rights reserved.
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