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By Sadie Stein
Dear readers,
During the hot and humid dog days of my childhood, my mother would tell us to dampen our sheets in the bathtub, wring them out and then spread them over ourselves in bed. “By the time they dry, you’ll be asleep!” she would say.
Summer makes me blue. I don’t know if it’s reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder or the feeling of everything slipping by, slipping away, so fast — or is it just that, for a grown-up in the city, it’s much like the rest of the year, only hotter?
I recommend leaning into the bittersweetness. These books may not qualify as conventional beach reads, but for those of us for whom ambivalence loves company, the following are as complicated and melancholy as a summer’s day.
—Sadie
“The Go-Between,” by L.P. Hartley
Fiction, 1953
“The past is a different country: they do things differently there.” So begins Leslie Poles Hartley’s elegiac classic, a meditation on youth, class, love and loss of innocence. You may not have read it in many years; you may think you’ve read it because you’ve seen the film; you might think you have no interest. But I beg you to pick it up. (I have already mentioned “The Greengage Summer” and Tove Jansson’s oeuvre in these pages; what can I say? I love a sad, hot summer novel!)
It is 1900 and Leo Colston, on the cusp of 13 and freed from his hidebound boarding school, is invited to stay with his wealthy classmate Marcus Maudsley at the country estate, Brandham Hall, that his family has rented for the summer. When Marcus falls ill, Leo finds himself acting as messenger between Marcus’s lovely older sister, Marian (promised to a local squire), and the local tenant farmer, Ted Burgess. The summer heat is lulling; the countryside gorgeous; the middle-class Leo is enchanted by the seemingly charmed lives of these beautiful people.
But as the plot thickens and Leo begins to understand the realities of this new and alien world, he experiences a disillusionment that will haunt him throughout his life. Hartley’s most famous novel is a master class in novelistic structure (there’s a reason several of the film adaptations have been successful), but the scaffolding allows for some of the most evocative writing I’ve read about childhood and its end. As the plot draws to its inevitable, horrible conclusion, you will feel, I think, for almost every character involved: the betrayed Leo, Marian and Ted, trapped by an intractable class system — even Marcus, overlooked and jealous. We know that two world wars are coming for this bucolic English idyll (of sorts). But even without that knowledge, hearts have always broken, and that scale never feels small.
Read if you like: “Atonement,” by Ian McEwan; “Brideshead Revisited,” by Evelyn Waugh; “The Death of the Heart,” by Elizabeth Bowen.
Available from: A true classic, this one will not be hard to borrow or buy. My 1960s edition, with Julie Christie on the cover, has been in my possession since high school, probably originally picked up at a library sale.
“Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America,” by David Hackett Fischer
Nonfiction, 1989
Nothing dates faster than history. But some history books — whatever later refinements occur, whichever claims are later disproved or overturned — stay with us. Fischer’s opus was my date to the Fourth of July, and while it might seem a perverse alternative to fireworks and parades, bear with me.
The years 1629-1750 saw four great migrations from Britain to the colonies. First came the Puritans to New England; then royalist landlords, indentured servants and poor farm laborers to the banks of the Chesapeake. Soon after came the Quakers, who settled in the Delaware Valley, followed by immigrants from the contested borderlands between England and Scotland and the shores of the Irish Sea.
Each brought its own customs, its own taboos and laws, its own ways of raising children and even its own way of building houses: saltbox clapboard from the orderly villages of East Anglia, fieldstone from the shires, frame houses set up on piles from the woods of Somerset and, from the far north, the rough cabins of the landless poor.
Needless to say, each also had its own way of thinking about sex. The Puritans — who punished sexual “perversion” with death — actually celebrated marital intimacy and gave young people wide latitude in their choice of life partner. The Quakers were on the whole less enthusiastic about the bedroom, while the ruling class of Virginia was, in every sense, cavalier.
It’s incredible how deeply these folkways imprinted themselves on the land and informed American culture in ways that resonate to this day. If Fischer’s book feels dated at all, it’s because it focuses on elites: The main characters, so to speak, are the charismatic leaders — representative men and women who imposed their religion, their ideologies, limitations and, perhaps, their pathologies on a new country. It’s a complex and powerful argument for a plurality of freedoms.
(And it’s fairly clear that the Puritans would definitely go for the wet sheets thing.)
Read if you like: “North Woods,” by Daniel Mason; “South to America,” by Imani Perry; “Salt,” by the Golden Bough
Available from: Order it directly from Oxford University Press, your local library or any good indie bookseller — I found my copy at Mostly Books in Philadelphia.
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