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Summary
Summary
The author of Please Don't Come Back from the Moon and My American Unhappiness delivers his breakout novel: a deft and hilarious exploration of the simmering tensions beneath the surface of a contented marriage which explode in the bedrooms and backyards of a small town over the course of a long, hot summer.
In the sweltering heat of one summer in a small Midwestern town, Claire and Don Lowry discover that married life isn't quite as they'd predicted.
One night Don, a father of three, leaves his house for an evening stroll, only to wake up the next morning stoned, and sleeping in a hammock next to a young woman he barely knows. His wife, Claire, leaves the house on this same night to go on a midnight run--only to find herself bumming cigarettes and beer outside the all-night convenience store.
As the summer lingers and the temperature rises, this quotidian town's adults grow wilder and more reckless while their children grow increasingly confused. Claire, Don, and their neighbors and friends find themselves on an existential odyssey, exploring the most puzzling quandaries of marriage and maturity. When does a fantasy become infidelity? When does compromise become resentment? When does routine become boring monotony? Can Claire and Don survive everything that befalls them in this one summer, forgive their mistakes, and begin again?
Award-winning writer Dean Bakopoulos delivers a brutally honest and incredibly funny novel about the strange and tenuous ties that bind us, and the strange and unlikely places we find connection. Full of mirth, melancholy, and redemption, Summerlong explores what happens when life goes awry.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bakopoulos (Please Don't Come Back from the Moon) trades in urban angst for smalltown discontent in this novel, which begins on a late-spring evening in Grinnell, Iowa, when married father of two, Don Lowry, comes across sexy and suicidal Amelia Benitez Cooper (called ABC); meanwhile, his wife, Claire, a one-time novelist, meets itinerant actor Charlie Gulliver. Recent returnees to Grinnell, ABC is mourning the death of her lover, Philly, and Charlie is going through his mentally incapacitated father's papers to find the novel he once wrote. ABC was one of the elder Gulliver's favorite students. As the summer temperature rises, the Lowrys decide to separate. Claire and the kids move in with Charlie, and Don moves in with ABC and the elderly woman she cares for, Ruth Manetti. In a last-ditch attempt to save their marriage, Don suggests to Claire that they go through with their annual family vacation at a friend's cabin on a lake in Northern Minnesota. Charlie, ABC, and Ruth are also along for the ride, as the story becomes a kind of American middle-class homage to Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. Although the ghosts of Cheever and Updike hover overhead, Bakopoulos is very much his own writer, and it is his distinct humanity and sense of humor that make this story so emotionally rewarding. This is that rare, contemporary suburban novel with characters the reader can actually embrace in spite of their many flaws. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An Iowa college town is ground zero for a host of relationship dramas in this provocative, sultry tale.Don Lowry is a real estate agent who's having trouble making sales in Great Recession-era Grinnell. His wife, Claire, is a writer who's spent more than a decade blocked on her second book. The last thing their marriage needs is an interloper, but across the summer chronicled in this novel, they wind up with two. Amelia Benitez-Coors, aka ABC, a young college grad mourning the death of her girlfriend and contemplating suicide, meets Don and cultivates a friendship thick with weed and flirtation. Charlie Gulliver, an actor, has returned to town to manage the affairs of his ailing father, an English professor with a lecherous past; he's soon making eyes at both Claire and ABC. Bakopoulos (English/Grinnell College; My American Unhappiness, 2011, etc.) doesn't labor too hard to establish the plausibility of this love trapezoid; he hastens through its early meet-cutes and meet-stoneds to address his main theme of how relationships survive (or don't) in the face of the outside pressures that are placed upon them. To its credit, the novel stays light on its feet; its breezy chapters are laced with sex and humor, the latter most often in the form of Ruth Manetti, the pot-smoking owner of the manse that becomes the hub for the various machinations. Indeed, between the louche vibe and matriarchal presence, the novel often feels like Armistead Maupin's San Francisco teleported to the Midwest. But Bakopoulos is forced to maintain a tricky balance between depicting his characters' newfound libertinism and taking its potential consequences (divorce, foreclosure) seriously; Don and Claire's children are present but little more than stock complications. The story closes with a few plot threads unraveled and some well-formed characters a touch too clouded in pot smoke. A well-intentioned and provocative, if messy, attempt to mess with the stock themes of domesticity. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It's a long, hot summer in the sleepy college town of Grinnell, Iowa. Don Lowry, the area's most successful real-estate agent, hides the fact that his own house is in foreclosure from his wife, one-time novelist Claire. Claire has secrets of her own: she's bored, lonely, and lusting after Charlie Gulliver, a failed actor who has returned home to care for his ailing father, a former professor with a reputation for seducing his female students. Over pot-smoking sessions, Don forms an unlikely friendship with one of those students. Known only by her initials, ABC, she is planning to commit suicide in order to go to the spirit world in search of her former roommate, the only person she ever truly loved. As Claire and Don spiral toward divorce, Charlie comes to terms with his father's legacy, and ABC finds an unlikely kindred spirit. Tennessee Williams has nothing on Bakopoulos (My American Unhappiness, 2011) when it comes to marital and moral dissipation fueled by the summer's rising temperatures. Yet into this emotional abyss Bakopoulos injects a high degree of coy humor and wry self-deprecation to deliver a heartbreaking and wise novel of false starts and new beginnings. A sure hit with fans of the three Jonathans: Dee, Franzen, and Tropper.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SEX. IN FICTION, as in life, it is a great catalyst, setting knickers and plots atwist. Also as in life, the sex in fiction, especially that had by adults behaving badly, is often far less interesting than the underlying tensions and motives that led to the bad behavior in the first place. So it goes in "Summerlong," Dean Bakopoulos's third novel, about a middle-aged couple's teetering marriage and the ways it is tested, by blows sudden and long-simmering, over the course of one hot, heavy-breathing season. The book is set in Grinnell, Iowa - Bakopoulos is writer in residence at Grinnell College - and is told from the perspectives of several characters. Don and Claire Lowry, both 38 and the parents of two children, are the spouses on the brink. Don, a real estate agent whose mug and cornball slogan ("It's your home, but it's my business!") are plastered all over town, grew up poor in Grinnell, coveting the bourgeois life. Although to his neighbors he exudes success, he is secretly flailing: burdened by debt, haunted by the ghost of his alcoholic father and stunned to realize that his "long, mostly happy" marriage is now a festeringly unhappy one. Claire, who grew up in Manhattan, was once a writer. But "something" - motherhood? isolation? Iowa? - has obliterated within her any sense of the woman she once was. She rarely writes. She has no friends. Her days are consumed by childcare logistics and drudgery. Although she and Don still get it on with remarkable frequency, she mainly feels resentment toward him and weariness over her family's unceasing need, "everyone around her demanding reassurance, as if there is a bottomless well of it, as if there is nothing that scares or overwhelms her." As the novel opens, Don is out walking. With his first lines Bakopoulos draws our attention to the fertile landscape of the Midwest and the febrile inner landscape of his leading man: "In the newly turned black earth, he smells energy and promise, which buoys him in a way he has not felt buoyed in some time, and he feels, along with the whole twitching prairie, as if he is on the verge of something either beautiful or terrible." What he is on the verge of is chancing upon an alluring young woman sprawled on the ground. This is Amelia Benitez-Coors, who is known as ABC, a recent graduate of Grinnell who spends her days smoking pot, mourning a dead lover and caring for an aged widow, Ruth. To Don, ABC seems to have "fallen from a high bough," and indeed her role is that of the nubile angel, arrived to captivate and comfort. She happens to be suicidal - not in a bleak way, but in a cheerful, dizzily philosophical way - and soon is convinced that Don is a human "vessel" sent to usher her to the "spirit world." On the same night Don stumbles into temptation, Claire is seized with the urge to take a run. In the parking lot of a Kum & Go (not an "interstate smut den," Bakopoulos informs the uninitiated, but a modest convenience store, "earnest and well lit"), she pauses to buy cigarettes, realizes she has forgotten her wallet, and takes out her frustration, with some violence, on an ice machine. Cue Charlie, a 29-year-old actor and Grinnell native, back in town to sort through his ailing father's voluminous (and, we learn, scandalous) papers. He is quick to offer cigarettes, beer and other varieties of bait, anything to woo Claire out of her anesthetized existence. A conventional question - will they or won't they? - drives the suspense. But Bakopoulos has set out to tell a more complex story about fidelity, loneliness and breakdown, to explore what brings people to that 3 o'clock hour when, as Fitzgerald wrote in "The Crack-Up," "the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream." He is partly successful. Over the course of the summer, Bakopoulos's characters - libidinous, delusional and increasingly intoxicated - maneuver their way into complicated sleeping arrangements, culminating in a trip to the edge of a lake where destinies are met and plot lines re- solved. The book as a whole is something like sex: by turns steamy, lovely, angry and clumsy, a muddle of fantasy, emotional baggage and awkward moments that amounts, by the climax, to a bit of a sticky mess. As he demonstrated in his previous novels, "Please Don't Come Back From the Moon" and "My American Unhappiness," Bakopoulos has a talent for weaving pathos with humor. His Midwest, described with wry tenderness, is beautiful but sad, like many of his characters. Dive bars are populated by "meth heads and farmers and blown-apart high school football failures, ... an invented family held together by bad decisions and muted rage and the occasionally intense night of karaoke with undergraduates." The terrain, with its "verdant yet desolate fields," "doesn't try to alleviate your pain with splendor." Bakopoulos is especially perceptive about the tedious and demoralizing aspects of motherhood, and about the guilt endemic in women who yearn to retain a sense of self in the face of forces which insist that self - identity, ambition, appetite - must be relinquished when one bears children. Claire is a hot ball of regret, her every choice up for interrogation. Bakopoulos's portrayal of her mind's chaos is a high point of the novel. PASSING IN AND out of the action is Ruth, ABC's octogenarian charge. Ruth bears close resemblance to Armistead Maupin's Anna Madrigal, from the "Tales of the City" novels, with her endless cache of marijuana ("purely medicinal, of course"), closely held secrets and steady supply of wise-old-lady pronouncements. To ABC: "Loneliness is a kind of suffering you can alleviate. It's not something you have to endure, like grief." To Don: "Midlife is when you have to accept what you've created, knowing that the life you have is the only one you will live." To Claire: "Nobody forgives mothers." From Ruth's mouth spills a fanciful piece of foreshadowing - involving the "profound change" augured by the appearance of fireflies - that is at first played as an eccentric notion but soon becomes a heavy-handed refrain, with the blinking bugs popping up at a rate bordering on silliness. Imagine introducing Chekhov's gun and, instead of stashing it away until the third act, taking it out repeatedly to bang the audience on the head with it. (Speaking of which: The novel has a gun, too, though perhaps we should call it Fitzgerald's, as it's relegated to a subplot heavy on references to "The Great Gatsby.") There are other problems, of structure and tone. Prematurely, Bakopoulos blunts the stakes. Momentous sex is had. A windfall is produced. But his characters have an entire family vacation and several scenes of melodrama yet to survive. Fitzgerald wrote that the truly "sunk" retreat into dream, foolishly "hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza." Bakopoulos furnishes the material and some version of the spiritual, in a manner that feels too easy and ultimately untrue. The strain shows on the page in the form of baggier writing, contrived dialogue and jarring turns in behavior and mood. And so as with sex, whether "Summerlong" is good for you may depend on the expectations you bring to the proceedings. If you're looking for a sustained, intensely meaningful performance, the novel may disappoint. But if you're down for a fling - complete with titillating premises and foregone conclusions - then dive in. It's summertime, after all. Issues of fidelity and loneliness, tied to the old question: Will they or won't they? JENNIFER B. MCDONALD is a former editor at the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
In the small Midwestern town of Grinnell, IA, the summer sun exposes despair, lust, and infidelity. Current and former residents merge-in more ways than one-seemingly to deal with a lingering question: Is the relative predictability of life in the Midwest pleasurable, mind-numbing, or both? The same quandary applies to marriage-safe, suffocating, or a mixture of the two? People whose paths cross in Grinnell during one distinct summer take advantage of typical coping escapes-sex, pot, alcohol-to avoid thinking about the elusive answers. Don and Claire have financial problems, ABC (a young woman who goes by her initials) is mourning the loss of her soul mate, Charlie is a discouraged actor, and Ruth is an older woman who serves as the collective memory of the town's behind-the-scenes life. Their entanglements enable each of them to move forward, at least a little. This look into the "summer of our discontent" concludes on a satisfying and somewhat mystical note. VERDICT In the vein of John Updike, Bakopoulos's third novel (after My American Unhappiness) reaches into the heart of a small community and reveals that sometimes lives need to unravel before they can be stitched together again. [Prepub Alert, 12/15/14.]-Susanne Wells, Indianapolis P.L. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
