Summer of 39 [Large Print] (Hardcover)

Miranda Seymour is best known as a biographer, having written lives of Henry James, Robert Graves, and Bloomsbury beanpole (and patroness) Ottoline Morrell. In The Summer of '39, however, she takes the raw material of fact and turns it into disturbing, artful fiction. Her novel recycles a literary legend--the disastrous visit of Graves and Laura Riding to a young American couple shortly before the Second World War. But instead of serving up a merely scandalous roman à clef, the author has delivered an extraordinary spin on betrayal and manipulation.

Seymour's young Americans, Nancy and Chance Brewster, do indeed have an awful time with their guests (whom the author has rechristened Charles Neville and Isabel March). But Nancy, who narrates the novel, is no less intent on recalling the years before the British invasion. First we hear about her loveless childhood, during which she is sexually abused by her father. Then Nancy recounts her marriage to hapless literary wannabe Chance. Clearly their relationship is a tenuous one: he extracts money from her, she extracts glimmers of emotional strength from him (when, that is, he's not off on one of his mysterious trips). As if that weren't enough, the couple also gets involved with a psychological-cult leader, who sets the stage perfectly for the arrival of the houseguests from hell.

Nancy recalls the whole mess as an old woman, who's retelling her past as a way to exorcise it. She's acutely sensitive to her surroundings but incapable of understanding them, not to mention herself: "I still love the peace I get from routine, the neat, repetitive creation of order and lines. Apples lying tidily shrouded, six by twelve, gave me the same satisfaction I take in drilling a straight row of seed, or folding the corners under on a clean linen sheet. I like visible results." As we discover, she's also prone to inappropriate remarks and is busily cementing her reputation as a dislikable, aging oddball. Yet Seymour develops the back-and-forth narrative with an expert hand (if, occasionally, a heavy one in the metaphor department). The actual visit, which mounts to an eerie psychological assault on the entire family, is powerful piece of storytelling. And you thought you had the summertime blues! --Teri Kieffer --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Novelist and biographer Seymour's inspiration for her fourth novel (following a biography of Robert Graves, Living on the Edge) comes from a notorious 1939 incident involving Graves and his then-companion, poet Laura Riding. As a result of the summer the two spent with Schuyler and Katharine Jackson, a young American couple, Jackson left his wife for Riding, and Katharine was institutionalized after attempting to strangle one of her daughters. Seymour's narrator is a Katharine Jackson-like character, who tells her story from the perspective of a reclusive old age. Nancy Parker grows up enduring her father's abuse and her mother's scorn; only her visits to her aunt and uncle at Point House in Falmouth, Mass., afford solace. On a trip to New York, she meets Chance Brewster, a promising young writer, literary impresario and founder of an obscure small press. After years in Greenwich Village and on New Jersey farms, always in close proximity to Bill and Annie Taylor, their closest friends, they end up at Point House, where Nancy, who has never entirely recovered from the trauma of her childhood and sensing herself out of place in the intellectual world she married into, finally feels safe. Gurdjieff and Edmund Wilson make appearances, but it is visionary poet Isabel March who has the greatest impact on the foursome. When Isabel and her lover, Charles Neville, move in with the Brewsters, Nancy allows the enigmatic woman to gradually take over her husband, poison her relationship with her children and push her over the edge into madness. Too late she learns that Isabel's mesmerizing obsession with truth in art masks her deceptive wiles. Although Isabel is not convincingly the charmer for whom men would die, the reverberations of her acts are powerful. In elegant, richly evocative prose, Seymour moves back and forth from Nancy's childhood to her old age, weaving a delicate net of narrative around an ominous core of darkness, in which personal demons are mixed up with a general dread of Hitler and the horrors to come. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.