SUMMER LIGHTNING

A novel tracks a family through the first half of the 20th century, with all its good times and bad, focusing on the clan’s quotidian hopes and dreams.

The story begins when Belle Brand’s life intersects with Isaac Kaplow’s while she is watching Charles Lindbergh take off on his historic 1927 flight. Belle and Isaac marry during the depths of the Depression when life is hard, but they are deeply in love. They survive and begin to prosper. Soon come two daughters, Sophy and Vivie. Readers follow the family’s fortunes through the Depression and the decades after—with flashbacks to Isaac’s previous life in Europe. The story covers the World War II era, the 1950s, the ’60s, and so on (and the family’s move from Brooklyn to the suburbs of Long Island). And then the headlines: the Holocaust, the March on Washington, Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt, and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, each with its own shocks and moral reverberations. Through a peculiar happenstance, Belle and the artist Larry Rivers become edgy friends (he paints her portrait), and other luminaries—Frank O’Hara, Leonard Bernstein, Nell Blaine—make appearances. Then readers watch the daughters, the mostly dutiful Sophy and the beautiful, unpredictable Vivie, grow up and find themselves. Through it all, the Kaplows persevere. Silman is a much-published writer, sure in her craft and very insightful. Belle can be a worrywart, but Isaac is the rock, the mensch. Sophy and Vivie find not only themselves, but also good and caring husbands. This is, in fact, an old-fashioned novel, the sort of engaging book that readers can slip into like a warm bath, and the Kaplows are the kind of people the audience will remember long after the last chapter. Readers certainly don’t lack for stories of chaos and calamity, so the current, much abraded world needs this type of tale more than ever. In the last chapter, the author writes that love “is more than a madness; It is the protection against all that awaits us, our only defense against the hurts and truths of this uncertain, clamorous world.”

This appealing family tale offers astute characterizations and a panoramic view of the 20th century.