Evergreen is one of those novels that span several decades as seen through the eyes of generations of a family. Such books always contain themes of continuity and change, personality and situation, and how every person's combination of inner self and social world sets her on a trajectory that overlaps and intersects with the trajectories of others, and produces a vast alone-ness in each individual life.
The other major theme in this book is: what is love, and what is its relationship to personality experience, to loss, to truth, to religion, to money and to family? The central impact that causes the ripples forming that theme in Evergreen is the two very different loves of Anna, the main character. Paul is the man with whom she feels an instant bond, and Joseph is the man who adores her. Both men remain in different ways in her life, and so she is doomed never to be whole. But in this early-to-mid-20th-century world of Jewish immigrants fighting to make their own place in New York, of wars and the Holocaust in Europe, turmoil and tragedy everywhere, is anyone really whole? Anna's are not the only hard choices that must be made.
Though it was published in 1978, this novel did not feel the slightest bit dated to me, but warm-blooded and real.
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