OF TIME AND CHANCE

A relationship between a college girl staying on a Vermont farm and a local boy poised to serve in the Vietnam War has life-altering consequences in Porter’s novel.

On June 5, 1967, Andy Keyes is intent on milking a cow on his family’s farm in West Severance, Vermont. He turns to face “the most beautiful girl he had ever seen” standing in the doorway. She wants to buy milk; he tells her that she can purchase bottled milk up at the farmhouse. The girl, perhaps flirting, asks, “Will you teach me how to milk?” but then flees. Soon, Andy and the girl meet again, and the novel unfolds to convey their growing romance as seen through the perspectives of the young lovers (and that of Andy’s grandmother, Nellie). Andy prepares to graduate from high school and considers enlisting to fight in Vietnam; he will soon get drafted anyway, when he turns 18. The girl (her birth name is Cynthia but she calls herself Crystal) is visiting for the summer at a nearby farm owned by her older sister and husband, who have a new baby. She waits, ambivalently, to begin her next year of college. Crystal almost runs off with a guitar-strumming male guest staying at her sister’s commune-like farm to experience the Summer of Love in San Francisco. However, Andy (and the camp he builds for the couple in the woods to give them some privacy) proves to be the greater attraction. The young couple struggle with their individual concerns and differing views; by summer’s end, Andy makes a dramatic life decision that most, if not all, of the novel’s characters ultimately understand and support.

The Vermont-based author has crafted a compelling and nuanced novel about an impactful, transitional summer for characters both young and old. She effectively sketches the uncertain aspects of the young lovers’ relationship, including several scenes of the couple just missing each other at their meet-up camp and experiencing doubts and inner turmoil. Porter also deftly weaves in a subplot regarding the wise, weary, and still hard-working Nellie’s shifting perspective about the war and growing fears about her declining health and imminent mortality. The novel’s New England rural setting is also well-captured: Crystal experiences a “magical walk in the forest at night” and learns that making hay bales, milking a cow, and camp cooking are not as simple and easy as they initially seem. Porter builds enjoyable, suspense-building tension into the narrative: Andy, sneaking off to his camp, dangerously intersects with his pro-war father’s mission to shoot deer coming up to the farm and his charming, snooping younger sister’s eagerness to learn how to shoot as well. Andy’s major move at the end of the novel comes as a bit of a surprise, but Porter provides sufficient underpinning for it with a shock-to-the-system episode at a funeral and Andy’s persistent expressions of yearning and love for Crystal. While the hazy outlook for this romance’s future by novel’s end may disappoint some, the conclusion lends the novel more power and verisimilitude in its presentation of a memorable, if fleeting, moment in time.

A beautifully realized depiction of young love, rural life, and the ideological struggles of the era.