SUMMERTIME

by Maureen McCoy ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1987

As in Walking After Midnight (1985), McCoy has enriched the interior journeys and (too pat, perhaps) resolutions of her characters with a glitter of bright pleasures and ripe recognitions--and a regional flavor heady as sun-blasted alfalfa. Here, a three-generational trio of Iowa women light up their futures with a reexamination of their shared past. The Morrow family's ""death-watching Morrowness"" is jarred in its idling rhythms when octogenarian Jessamine marries Hazen, co-resident of the Hillcrest Retirement Home. Daughter-in-law Alice, widowed 15 months, was ""truly deep, deep, bone-weary done. . .with the man-woman thing."" And ""Hope didn't run in my family,"" observes Alice's daughter Carla, whose father, James Lawrence, took 20 years to die of leukemia, and whose death is at the heart of the family dirge. Jessamine, in love, still obligates her dead son James to pronounce on her second marriage; Alice, a buyer at ""Craftique,"" a mail-order trash-and-treasure business (plastic acorn or Dutch shoe planter--""the thingness of life is a comfort"") cannot accept the attentions of widower Mel. Carla, both awed and dismayed by the fact of her first pregnancy at 34, and angered by husband Brian's lack of appropriate enthusiasm, temporarily moves in with her mother Alice and flirts with varieties of the unfettered life. As the women scour their pasts and muddle through the present, three punishing experiences pound home a lesson in seizing the day and loving anew. McCoy's backyard vistas, downtowns and ziggurats of household clutter quiver with a luminescent reality as well as a playful flavor of America's byways and buy-ways: a huge supermarket with its ""big, bland, mixed-up smell of man-made lake"" (think about it) or the ""trinkety bygone innocence of the dime store."" With top-to-toe good folk sensitive as wind chimes to currents of danger and loss as well as sweet ""promise and possibility,"" another deceptively soft-voiced McCoy novel in which a place, our times, and daily ""ordinariness"" are set forth with humor and wisdom.

Pub Date: April 1, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Poseidon/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987

Categories: FICTION