The Summer Before the Summer of Love: Stories - Hardcover

Swick, Marly A.; Swick, Marly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060172541 ISBN 13: 9780060172541

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1995

Synopsis

A collection of stories follows themes of family relationships and disappointment, presenting a realistic observation of the dynamics among spouses, siblings, and parents and children

About this title

Reviews

The characters in this second story collection from the author of A Hole in the Language (which won the 1990 Iowa Short Fiction Award and has since been retitled Monogamy) live in a familiar modern American landscape where suburban adultery, alienated youth, betrayal, divorce and untimely death abound. Swick's language, particularly her dialogue, resounds with the joy, suffering or confusion felt by her characters. In "The Shadow of the Cross," Evan is on vacation with his wife, Molly, but is falling in love with her unmarried friend Delia, who has come along on the trip to Taos, N.M. Losing Molly means losing his daughters, but after he and Delia view a local "mystery" painting of Christ, Evan finds himself hoping that a sign of his new love will emerge in Molly's photograph of him and Delia in the same way that a cross miraculously appeared over Christ's shoulder as they looked at the painting in total darkness. In "The Ghost Mother," a savvy pair of married L.A. screenwriters who are unable to have a child take in a pregnant teenager, found through a baby broker, whose baby they will adopt. Like a ghostwriter, the girl has been brought in to "author" the baby the wife cannot have. But the wife, unable to generate any maternal feelings toward this 16-year-old child, wonders how she will respond when the baby is born and becomes, suddenly, her own. In "The Prodigal Father," middle-aged Marshall hangs around his college-age daughter's house after his own burns down in the Oakland fires. Tripping on LSD with one of her housemates, he mourns not only the loss of his house and belongings but also of his long-gone marriage, his dog, his old life. But, ultimately, he?like other figures in this rewarding collection?arrives at quiet insights that prove both satisfying and resonant.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The liltingly funny title of Swick's second stellar short story collection is indicative of her wistfulness and tender irony. Swick is keenly attuned to the persistence of sorrow and the snarl of emotions underlying everyday lives. Here, in these meticulous, quintessentially American stories, she dramatizes various triangular relationships and the aftershocks of divorce. Her characters--children angered by the behavior of their divorced parents, a woman mourning the abrupt death of her married lover, a man in love with his wife's best friend--manage to function by sheer willpower. In the title story, for instance, the mother of two teenage girls has been trying to attain maternal perfection in the wake of her divorce, but her grandest gesture, taking her girls to see the Beatles in Cincinnati in August 1966, backfires, and the true essence of each of their prickly personalities is starkly revealed. Indeed, there's a certain inevitability, a genetic destiny if you will, underlying these tales, a fact of life that we all try to ignore but that runs us down with dependable force just the same. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060172541
• ISBN 13: 9780060172541
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 209