The Silk Road: A Novel - Softcover

Summer, Jane

3.46

94 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 155583549X ISBN 13: 9781555835491

Publisher: Alyson Books, 2000

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Traveling The Silk Road: an interview with author Jane Summer

"Adults have forgotten the feel of a teenager's love. For you a teenager will walk through glass doors, stay awake three days in a row, be an angel standing under your window in the rain. So what that we don't know how to order from the butcher or apply foundation or insert a diaphragm? Show us."

So advises Paige Bergman, a high school student who falls in love with housewife Fiona Gallagher in Jane Summer's lyrical debut novel, The Silk Road. Part dark comedy, part suburban epic, the book, set in the 1970s, hitches along with Paige as she explores her obsessions for fast cars, all things morose, and the search for one astonishing true love.

Lesbianism, self-mutilation, intergenerational relationships, adultery, madness--these are some of the topics you address. Not your typical coming-of-age novel. Were there any roadblocks in getting it published?
When my agent began shopping The Silk Road around, many of my straight friends told me to be careful not to become ghettoized. They were warning me against going with a gay and lesbian publisher. Yeah, I agreed, I didn't want the book on some dusty shelf next to The Well of Loneliness. But more importantly, I didn't want the book to be pegged as a lesbian novel, because it would immediately limit my audience. Why should any serious novel be relegated to the gay and lesbian section of Barnes and Noble because some of the characters are gay? Is To the Lighthouse filed in Women's Studies? Invisible Man in African-American Studies? Mainstream publishers turned my agent and me down, most of them saying they liked the book but felt it had a limited audience. "Don't become ghettoized." As if I'd had the choice. But actually this experience turned me around. I get a big kick from the idea of my friends, colleagues, and family having to trek over to the Gay and Lesbian Studies section to find the novel. And I feel even more strongly about supporting the gay community in all spheres.

Who is the audience you envisioned for the novel?
Oddly enough, I pictured mostly straight people reading The Silk Road, because those are larg

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Review:

Three great things about naming your fictional hometown Hell: you can suggest so much about growing up in suburbia in the '60s; you can shamelessly use Dante for your epigram; and you can deliver wry, double-edged observations along the lines of "Children in Hell ... provide constant birdsong." Jane Summer's stylish debut has more going for it than this joke, but the puckish, observant sensibility behind the choice of the town name permeates this coming-of-age novel and accounts for its unusual appeal. The story itself--a determined girl's slow seduction of an older woman--may seem all too familiar to lesbian readers who endured the '70s or early '80s. In The Silk Road, high school sophomore Paige Bergman, blessed with good looks but cursed with eyeglasses, accepts a baby-sitting job with a strange family across town, the Gallaghers, only to discover that Mrs. Gallagher is the same woman Paige has been quietly obsessed with for the past year: the elegant driver of a Buick Skylark that is sometimes parked near Paige's house. Without the soft-focus nostalgia common to the genre, Summer's depiction of early love is skillfully written and achingly accurate. --Regina Marler

About the Author:

Jane Summer is the author of The Silk Road. She lives in New York.

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