Breezy Beach Reads, Part 2

Heading to warm climes for a winter vacation? Here are a couple of novels that won’t demand much strenuous thought in the reading—in other words, beach reads. For more reviews of beach reads, click here.

Summer of ’69     Elin Hilderbrand     (2019)

When I pick up a book, the first thing I always do is read any sections called “Acknowledgments” and “Author’s Notes,” which are usually at the end of the main text. I take the risk of running into spoilers, but I can’t help myself. I want to know where the author was coming from when he or she sat down to write. I want to know who helped with the research, the drafts, the final editing. I look for names of people I remember from my brief stint in the 1990s as the director of a graduate MFA program.

In the Author’s Note at the back of Summer of ’69, Elin Hilderbrand explains that she was born on July 17, 1969, six minutes before her twin brother, Eric, entered the world. This alone is a surprising fact—multiple births were not as common in 1969 as they are today with advances in assisted reproduction and in neonatal intensive care. Fifty years on, Elin is a prolific writer of beach reads. In this one (her twenty-third), she revisits the momentous events of the summer that she herself was born, including in her fictional narrative such actual occurrences as the spellbinding Apollo 11 mission to the moon; the tragic death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick that derailed Ted Kennedy’s presidential hopes; the fabled rock ‘n’ roll encampment at Woodstock; and the continuing slaughter of troops and civilians in Vietnam.

Her main characters are the Levin family, who summer on Nantucket, the small island off Cape Cod. Blair, the eldest of the offspring, is recently married and is diagnosed late in pregnancy as carrying twins. Kirby, the rebel sister, takes a job on the nearby island of Martha’s Vineyard, where she is almost a witness in the Kopechne/Kennedy case. Tiger, the only son, is off fighting in Vietnam, driving his mother to drink. And 13-year-old Jessie, the youngest, gets invited to Woodstock. Hilderbrand takes us back to 1969 in all its glory and horror through the experiences of this family. Some of the plot twists will be obvious to any avid reader of mystery novels, and a few anachronisms crop up. But, despite the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Summer of ’69 is mostly brisk and cheerful, with wrap-ups of most of the plot lines by the final pages. You can have that second margarita and still be able to follow the story.

The Islanders     Meg Mitchell Moore     (2019)

Even more lightweight than Summer of ’69 is this novel set on Block Island, off the coast of the state of Rhode Island. The main character is Anthony Puckett, a writer who produced one best-selling novel and then became enmired in a literary scandal.

Anthony is hiding out on Block Island for the summer when he meets Joy Sousa, owner of a whoopee pie café and single mom to a teenage daughter, and Lu Trusdale, former lawyer now reluctantly staying home with her two preschool boys. These three characters have considerable substance, which is not the case for some of the lesser characters, such as Lu’s husband, who have the personalities of cardboard cutouts. The interactions of Anthony, Joy, and Lu drive the plot of The Islanders, and that plot won’t challenge your brain in any meaningful way as you sip your beverage of choice at the cabana. Just lap up the scenes of surf and sand.

What I’d like to mention, with a spoiler alert, is the uncanny similarity between components of The Islanders and components of three other contemporary novels, two of which I’ve reviewed on this blog.

1.   Beatriz Williams’s A Hundred Summers (2013):  a hurricane in the denouement.

2.   Ann Leary’s The Children (2017): a woman who writes a highly successful blog that has a major deception at its core.

3.   Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife (2003): an acclaimed male writer who takes the credit for his wife’s writing, with her assent.

I’ll concede that the 1. could be coincidence, since hurricanes are pretty common on the East Coast these days. But 2. and 3.—really?

A Connecticut Family

The Children     Ann Leary     (2017)

Oh, no, I thought—another fluffy tale of wacky, self-absorbed New England trust-fund kiddies seeking personal gratification at the expense of those around them. I almost sent The Children back to the library. But I kept reading and watched the plot twisting, folding back on itself, and finally turning dark, very dark. The fluff definitely receded.

You have to pay close attention up front to sort out all the family connections in this novel. Charlotte Maynard, a 29-year-old single, agoraphobic woman, is one of the kiddies and is the narrator of The Children. She lives in a huge Connecticut house named Lakeside with her zany mother, Joan, who exercises excessively and pinches pennies ludicrously. Charlotte is involved intermittently with Everett, the groundskeeper at Lakeside. Charlotte’s sister is Sally, a gifted musician with mental health problems. Stepbrothers Spin and Perry Whitman are offspring from Charlotte’s stepfather’s first marriage, which ended acrimoniously when the stepfather, Whit Whitman, fell for Joan. As the novel opens, Whit has recently died, and the family dynamics are reshuffling. Got all that?

Spin, who teaches and lives at a nearby private school, arrives at Lakeside with a girlfriend, Laurel Atwood, who is preternaturally accomplished in skiing, fiction writing, and life hacks. Laurel’s life hacks veer daringly into illegal territory. Charlotte doesn’t see this as a problem, because she herself runs a profitable internet scam, a fake “mommy blog” with corporate sponsorship. But Sally, who is back at Lakeside from New York after losing her orchestra job, has serious reservations about Laurel.

This is the setup, but I won’t spoil the plot development for you. Author Ann Leary takes the basic framework  in directions you’d never expect, with characters who are believable despite—or maybe because of—their oddities. We see people and events through the eyes of Charlotte, which creates a layer of reportorial unreliability, since Charlotte is an admitted scammer. Through Charlotte, Leary pokes fun at several aspects of contemporary culture, especially internet culture. For example, Charlotte’s wildly successful blog revolves around children whom she’s invented (another reference to the novel’s title), and Leary revels in skewering the blog’s fervent mommy-followers. The technological references, which are up-to-the-minute as of 2017, may soon date this novel, but for now it’s trendy in a good way.

The pace of The Children is fast, the dialogue is clever and authentic, and the storyline is well executed. I see the novel as a work of warning about the consequences of seemingly innocuous lies and the seeming innocuousness of consequential lies. The human heart can have unexpectedly sinister depths. That’s the dark part. Yet Charlotte reminds us that we can always count on the stars, which are as stable as it gets in our universe. “Once you find Polaris, you’ve found true north. You can navigate anywhere from there.  Find a landmark . . . You have to find a hill or a house or a tree while it’s still dark; that way you’ll be oriented the next day, when the stars are gone.” (245)