Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon Publications, September 2016)
Peter S. Beagle is a treasure of the fantasy field. His novel The Last Unicorn will forever be a seminal fantasy text, and he deserves an award—more awards, actually, since he already has so many—for suffering through what sounds like the worst manager situation ever. Summerlong is his first book in more than a decade, and the anticipation surrounding it was deservedly high. And while the book has moments of Beagle’s old magic—moments that capture and ensorcel, prose more melodic than music and images carved out before your very eyes, perfect and powerful—I confess to finishing this book with more than little disappointment, frustration, and despair.
In Summerlong, we follow Abe and Joanna (a couple for more than 20 years but unmarried) as they meet Lioness Lazos, an enigmatic woman who comes to live in Abe’s garage. But things begin to go a little strange the more Lioness hangs around, and soon her mythic past begins to catch up with her—a mysterious mother and a dangerous husband. Lioness pulls Abe and Joanna (and every minor character, too) into her strange orbit, disrupting their lives, at once bringing magic and chaos to them.
Beagle is at his best in this book when he’s placing his characters and story in the world. The narrative takes place on and around Puget Sound, and Beagle manages to make that drizzly, grey (though, once Lioness shows up, not so grey) world feel totally real. Here he is, doing his thing:
The island’s highest ridges were a ragged, foggy tonsure where only owls and eagles nested, and where a few overgrown dirt paths still opened out into wide lawns and stone houses: last survivors of Gardner’s great lumber days, now inhabited by fourth-generation website designers and financial planners.
Summerlong features a nostalgia and romanticization for a simpler past that is unswerving and unironic. Abe and Joanna always go to the same diner, always sit in the same booth, have a familiar patter constantly running between them. He plays the harmonica and she wants to go kayaking, but alone and in a whale-skin kayak (she settles for something a little more modern, but still). He brews beer and gets romantically and stereotypically lost in the 14th century while working on his book, and she shoots baskets and goes to the market. There’s a sort of very genuine, very romantic nostalgia here, unapologetic and earnest—Abe and Joanna don’t take themselves too seriously, always joking and laughing about getting old and being crotchety, but there’s another way in which they take themselves totally seriously. This genuine crush on the old and forgotten ways of the world—harmonicas and self-brewed beer, diners where everyone knows your name—oscillates between totally charming and way too much.
Endings, we all learn, must be surprising and yet inevitable. Summerlong, sadly, features an ending the attentive reader will have seen coming from the early pages of the book—not because the narrative has set us on a course of impending inevitability but because Beagle deals with two narrative engines here: one the unassailable, inflexible myth of Persephone (here personified as Lioness), and the other the frustratingly stock romance between a quippy, old-but-still-good-looking academic and a near-retirement flight attendant anxious from page one to dump the academic and reconnect with her daughter. Yes, of course the academic discovers his deep and profound musical ability with the harmonica, and yes of course the couple stays together for awhile out of sheer convenience, and yes of course it ends when he sleeps with a much younger woman (the sex scene being described, of course, as one of domination and liberty). The story doesn’t earn this ending so much as it screams it at the reader from the very first pages, and the frustration I felt in finishing the book had everything to do with seeing a story that might have been wonderful smothered beneath the weight of a barely-covered myth retelling and a cliched real world narrative.
But here’s the real problem: after the inevitable and unsurprising climax of the book (the first of two, I suppose, though the only real one), which pulls apart the only relationship Beagle has invested any real time into throughout the novel, we’re left with characters who feel out of sorts and relationships that at once need to be meaningful and important but simply can’t be—they’ve been ignored or lightly treated for the previous 150 pages. Joanna has what could be a momentous and important kayaking trip with her daughter Lily, but their troubled relationship was painted with only the broadest of brushes, and so comments from Lily like, “I’m not Outdoorsy Girl, I’m sorry. Let’s just go home, and you can be ashamed of me all you like, I won’t say a word,” come across as flat and clunky, emotionally manipulative or narratively unearned. These on-the-nose statements assure me of the realities of this relationship but they also serve to highlight how little I believe in those realities. If this relationship is earned, if it’s been built over the course of 200 pages, then a statement like that isn’t necessary; I already know. Instead, we’re left with a denouement filled with this kind of emotional telling, and the process of reading it is an often discombobulating one.
Often frustrating and disappointing, Summerlong nevertheless attempts to reinvigorate a favorite theme of Beagle’s: what happens to everyday life when it meets the magical, the unexplainable? How do we live after such experiences? Although Beagle’s newest novel falters at times in its answers to those questions, I remain glad that one of fantasy’s greats is back and publishing novels again.
What new books from favorite authors have you been reading lately, dear reader?
Riverine by Angela Palm (Graywolf Press, 2016)
I picked up Riverine and found more of myself than I’d bargained for. A child with a racing mind and rabidly romantic devotion to her first ever friend. Land with an impossible need to continue in and of itself, despite human tampering. All that, and a language with the kind of focus and endurance that sometimes leads to hope. “Like rivers,” Palm writes, “people are always folding back on themselves, and then straightening again. Contradicting themselves. Pulling off a bluff even as they try to begin anew, and then collapsing back onto the past.” In this memoir, rife with subtly repeated images and motifs, Angela Palm inspects the branches of her life and her trajectory away from suffocation.
Raised in rural Indiana, in a tiny township, Palm’s early years were marked by domestic unrest, the Farmer’s Almanac, and the boy next door. In her memoir, she goes back to the beginning, and follows from there the trails that have lead to her adulthood as writer, mother, wife, and homecoming love.
Though we experience the span of her life, Palm’s childhood and adolescent persona feels especially accessible to me. There’s a poignancy to the point of view in these early chapters that feels immediate and familiar—as if the naiveté of my own childhood has bloomed again before my eyes, coloring the world with both curiosity and suspicion. Perhaps I feel at home with Palm’s voice here because of our Scorpio kinship? Or, more likely, the internal dialogue in Part I, “Fields,” is so brooding and obsessive that it could captivate any audience. Palm perfectly dissects the myth-building and meaning-making involved in childhood thinking, not ignoring but instead highlighting the mundane artifacts of life and their power to shape the mind. For instance, she illustrates the lewd illustration on her father’s cap which would inform her idea of womanhood and female attractiveness. From the discussion of the cap, Palm seamlessly branches into a rich characterization of her mother and thus propels the memoir with powerful and earned energy.
In fact, part of the appeal of Riverine is the way the memoirist includes the material world in the development of her story. Palm laces history into both time and landscape in a way that makes this book decidedly real. After pointing to the blank yellow on the map where she was raised, she recalls the riverbed’s first inhabitants, the Potawatomi, who were exiled by the Indian Removal Act. She continues, throughout the book, to contextualize her own existence in space with history—how the Kankakee River was re-routed in the 1800s, leaving behind the floodplain of her childhood house. Later, she recalls Monica Lewinsky and the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996 and 1997; both mile-markers in her adolescence with significant impacts on national discourse as well as her local economy.
If you’re on the fence about memoirs, then consider this: Riverine is a smart book. Would you care to learn a bit about thermodynamics and entropy? What about bifurcation and the splitting and re-planting of hostas? Or Badlands, the 1973 Terrence Malick film? Palm is unreserved in her roaming and generous as she shares how the mind makes sense of life’s strange echoes of itself. What’s more, she’s funny.
I likened dead Papa Lou to Jesus and Santa, to Danny Boy and Fido. This bothered me because I preferred to pee alone, and now there were two invisible persons, one invisible God, and two dead dogs following me into the bathroom. It was getting crowded.
As non-fiction requires, Palm shows her flaws unabashedly. This is a person you want to know, or maybe you feel like you come to know her, to love her even. This is a beautiful story of coping, survival. “I have taken meditation everywhere and sprinkled its soft gray middle across the land like salt.” And this is the diction and the imagery that Palm rewards you with for reading her memoir. Finally, that person who has interrogated the earth for its patterns and the heart for its ability to remember, she tells the most satisfying story of unrequited love that I’ve ever encountered. Love and a river that also rises and falls, robs and renews.
What are the landscapes that have made you who you are as a writer? as a reader?
Hi folks. Turns out, fall is a chaotically busy season for many of us at Hazel & Wren, and probably many of you, too. So much so that we forget things, like the fact that What We’re Reading is scheduled for Thursdays. Have patience with us, won’t you, please? In lieu of our normally scheduled book review, we hope you’ll accept today’s “Oops” edition in honor of the season that makes us so forgetful. Here are a few poems about autumn; thanks for your patience, friends.
“Falling: The Code” by Li-Young Lee
“The Heat of Autumn” by Jane Hirshfield
What are your favorite poems about fall?
Rani Patel in Full Effect by Sonia Patel (Cinco Puntos Press, October 2016)
TW: mention of sexual assault, child abuse
In the past few years, there’s been an increasing trend of YA books tackling difficult topics such as rape, abuse, and eating disorders. They’re important topics to discuss, especially because they’re topics which are often considered too “risque” or “taboo” to talk to teenagers about. Unfortunately, a lot of YA books (and adult books, for that matter) include sexual assault or abuse plotlines simply for the shock value, or to grab the attention of a big publishers by exploiting a hot button topic. As a result, many books fail to accurately portray the lasting trauma that survivors deal with.
Rani Patel in Full Effect is different. Rani Patel in Full Effect is fast-paced, heart-wrenching, relatable, and, most importantly, isn’t afraid to show exactly what it means to go through—and overcome—trauma.
The titular character, Rani, is a sixteen-year-old Gujarati Indian girl living in Moloka’i, Hawaii. The book opens with Rani stumbling upon her father kissing a woman who is not his wife. Distraught, Rani shaves her head, in the tradition of Gujarati women who cut off their hair after being widowed. Rani has always dealt with her feelings by writing rap lyrics, and at the urging of an older man named Mark, she joins an underground rap group named 4Eva Flowin’. But Mark doesn’t just want to be her emcee mentor; despite being over ten years older than Rani, Mark asks her out, and the two start a tumultuous relationship. Desperate to fill the void her father left, Rani doesn’t realize that Mark is manipulating her, pressuring her into drinking and other, more dangerous things. Rani doesn’t listen to her friends who urge her to stop seeing Mark (who, it’s revealed, is a drug addict with a habit of going after younger girls). And then, one night, Mark rapes Rani.
Rape scenes are difficult, and not just in terms of subject matter. Written too graphically, it can feel as if the author is being exploitative, engaging in “trauma tourism” while not acknowledging the aftermath. Sonia Patel handles this scene with empathy and tact. It’s uncomfortable to read, as it should be, but Patel also knows when to fade to black, acknowledging that reading about trauma does not have to create new traumas.
It’s not just the writing of the assault itself that is remarkably well done. After Rani is raped by Mark, she goes back to him. Again. And again. And again. She’s convinced that he loves her, that he deserves a second chance, and, worst of all, if Mark doesn’t love her, no one will. It’s difficult to read, almost torturous. There were points where I wanted to grab Rani by the shoulders and shake her, asking, “What are you doing?!” But Rani’s complete willingness to look past Mark’s assault of her is, sadly, all too realistic. Many people—particularly young people in their first relationships—who are abused are unable or unwilling to leave.
Sonia Patel’s accurate portrayal of a young girl’s response to abuse makes sense when you look at her background. Patel isn’t some author writing about a random issue she thinks will sell copies; she has her M.D. in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and she has her own practice in Hawai’i. If there’s one thing Patel knows how to write, it’s people. Patel’s characters—and their relationships—are some of the most complex I’ve ever seen. Even supporting characters, such as Rani’s mother, who is initially portrayed as weak and emotionally distant, get their own fully fleshed-out arcs. (Rani’s mother rebuilds her relationship with her daughter and learns to stand up for herself, a feat she had never thought herself worthy of. It’s a beautiful journey to watch and yes, of course, I cried.)
Another of Patel’s strengths is tone. It would be easy for Rani’s story to become overwhelmingly dark, to be so difficult to witness that it would turn away readers who needed it. But Patel gracefully balances even the most somber of moments with moments of friendship, humor, and hope.At the end of the novel, Rani even finds love—real, healthy love this time—and she also finds friendship and courage in the 4Eva Flowin’ group. Her raps are empowering feminist jams that make me wish she was a real-world emcee. Here’s a sample from the rap she does at the 4Eva Flowin’ showcase towards the end of the book:
Don’t call me Sultana
Blazin’ it down settin’ off the alarm-a
I’m a charma’ with plenty of armor
more like Cleopatra spittin’ your mantra
brain so big I attain my own rain
don’t need your ball and chain
cuz I’m gonna sustain my own reign
what I’m sayin’ got you obeyin’
crushin’ your cranium—mantis prayin’
you be crass, checkin’ on this ass
while I be smashing your rhyme window like glass
(You can watch Sonia Patel spitting some of the rhymes she wrote for Rani here because, in addition to being a psychiatrist, she’s also a rapper. Can you say “badass”???)
Rani Patel in Full Effect does all the right things that a book about sexual assault and emotional healing should do. It’ll make you laugh, cry, and maybe even write your own raps (which, if you’re like me, you quickly decide to never share with anyone). Rani Patel is the complicated heroine you will be thinking about months after you close the book.
What books have you read lately that dealt with difficult topics?
