THE SUMMER HUNT

by Joseph Monninger ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1982

Noel Simpson, art American doing good works in Africa, is suddenly fetched home to New Hampshire by his father's terminal illness. New-wife Kathy is, he senses, relieved. (""He felt as a child might feel showing a new playmate something novel, only to have the playmate find the object stupid, of no importance."") After all, the heat had been too much for her, the numbing strangeness. Kathy's also disturbed by Noel's seeming acceptance of violent and tandem death: the birds and lepers in Africa; his toying--once back in the States--with the idea of euthanasia for his painfully, terminally ill father. And, in New Hampshire, Noel and Kathy find summer, with still more heat--as well as a malevolent spirit in the air which Kathy especially feels. (This threatening anxiety is symbolically manifested by a shadowy tramp who haunts the local night, killing small animals for the furs and feathers, selling them to a man who makes his own fishing lures.) Monninger's second novel is a moody, thematic matrix, then--one that never quite adds up. But this young writer shows here the scene-by-scene talent that was missing from his recent debut, The Family Man: the Africa sequences are vivid, especially Noel's descent into a village well (which he helped the Africans to construct); the New Hampshire section, though rather pallid, is gracefully, impressively written--in prose that's reminiscent of Larry Woiwode at his most discrete and aware. And so, if ultimately too limp and murky as it weaves its heat/death/animals/violence imagery, this is promising work--a heartening recovery after the empty pretensions of The Family Man.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1982

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1982

Categories: FICTION