Starting Out in the Evening (Morton, Brian) 1998

I was at the UVM library on Friday looking for books on Nonparametric statistics and Bootstrapping for work, and was looking for The Shack on my MIL's recommendation.  That wasn't there, but as I was standing at the end of an aisle of books, caught sight of James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter and a book by him that I hadn't read (The Last Witchfinder; reading in progress). Starting Out in the Evening was shelved next to these, and I recognized the title because the movie starring Frank Langella got rave reviews from Seven Days and elsewhere, and so it's in the Netflix queue.  At any rate, this was fate and I naturally had to read it.  I liked it.  To me, the novel explores a triangle of people at the end, middle, and beginning of their careers/lives, and ruminates upon how each sees the others through the lens of their individual experiences and reexamines themselves.  Leonard Schiller is a human and sympathetic, if typical, older character who has "failed" as a father; unfortunately, Leonard feels like the only fully developed character and the others are varying degrees of partly formed and/or not entirely believable -- this is only really problematic w.r.t. Ariel Schiller and Heather Wolfe, since much of the novel is written from their POV as the primary representatives of the "middle" and "beginning" vertices of the triangle.  Heather, in particular, rings false at times, perhaps because Brian Morton was some years removed from his twenties when the novel was published.  Ariel doesn't ring entirely false so much as I don't feel I understand her well enough for a character who is supposed to be "simple" and open and has had much of the novel dedicated to her POV.  Still, Ariel is (not surprisingly) not as simple as she is perceived by others, and it is Ariel, poised at mid-life with the experience that Heather lacks and the vitality that Leonard has lost, who provides the most insightful thoughts in the novel.  I'm excited to see the film, since Langella's film career has certain similarities to Schiller's as a writer (both largely unknown and unappreciated for the few gems in their ouevre), though I have difficulty imagining Langella as overweight as Schiller is portrayed in the novel.