It’s been three years since Peter S. Beagle released a short story or essay, and longer than that since his last novel. That’s a long dry spell, especially for someone who’s writing was such a big part of my childhood. Fortunately Beagle’s latest novel, Summerlong, is due out this September, and it’s absolutely worth the wait.
Retired professor Abe and soon-to-be-retired flight attendant Joanna have spent the last twenty-two years building a comfortable life for themselves. They have their own odd quirks, but also a lot of sense; they’re certainly not the type of people to be captivated by a total stranger and invite her to live with them. Except that’s exactly what they do a few hours after meeting the new waitress at their favorite diner.
The beautiful Lioness always has that effect, effortlessly charming the people she meets and causing everyone – customers, neighbors, children, whales, Joanna’s often-heartbroken grown daughter Lilly, even the usually gloomy Puget Sound weather – to fall head-over-heels in love with her. Abe and Joanna are soon exploring new dreams for themselves, and trying to ignore the nagging sense that there’s more to Lioness than she’s letting anyone know.
I’ve been to the Northwest exactly once, to attend a wedding years ago on San Juan Island. I remember it being so beautiful there, and so surprisingly varied. On one island there were quaint little towns and meadows and forested trails and a tiny Greek mausoleum and rocky cliffs surrounding the beaches (with Orcas, if you were lucky). The picture Beagle paints of life on the fictional Gardner Island makes me want to go back, right now. (And I especially want to try kayaking; one of the characters develops a passion for kayaking, and a whole chapter is devoted to a kayak trip on Puget Sound.) The author gradually unfolds the atmospheric descriptions of the island and nearby Seattle, along with the dreamlike and sometimes meandering story of two everyday people thrown into something that’s a lot more than they can ever understand.
Joanna and Abe are unlikely protagonists. It’d be wrong to say they’re unhappy, more like they’ve found their own way of being happy in the midst of life’s mundane disappointments. Abe is writing a book about a historical figure he isn’t sure anyone else cares about, while Joanna is sick of being the oldest among her progressively younger and younger coworkers. Joanna also has the typical adversarial relationship with Lilly – whom Abe adores – and Abe has to deal with the occasional outburst from Joanna who feels like she’s failed Lily as a mother, and failed at being a worthwhile person, and surely Abe doesn’t deserve to be stuck with an aging failure for a girlfriend.
They usually talk each other down from their moods; after more than twenty years together they’ve learned everything about how the other one ticks (mostly), and Beagle writes them both with lots of humor and zero tolerance for bullshit, even while dealing with their own odd obsession with Abe’s mysterious houseguest.
“How do I know you’re not going to run off to Bali with this child?”
“Because I’m sixty-five years old, with hair in my ears. Because you know every one of my limitations in bed. Because I can’t afford to run off to anywhere we can’t walk to. Because she’d pull really important muscles laughing. Because I happen to be exhaustively involved with a cranky, contrary, insomniac basketball freak of a Sicilian flight attendant. Pick any one of the above. Very carefully.
Joanna was laughing now. “None of the above, although I do have my favorite.”
And then there’s Lioness Lazos, waitress at the Skyliner Diner. Strange things happen in the impossibly beautiful summer she spends living in Abe’s garage. She talks to a confused Orca whale, teaches children to find flowers in places where flowers weren’t planted, and somehow convinces everyone she meets to open their heart to her. People fall in love right and left, but they never dream of asking for more than she’s willing to give. I can’t go into a whole lot of detail without giving away something, but she comes from a much older story. It only took one word about halfway through the book for me to go “Ohhh, so that’s what this is about,” and once you get there you’ll probably think you already know where the plot is going. But you won’t, not quite. This is sort of a combination of “what if” and “but what happened next” that Beagle is writing here, and while the lovely Lioness has everyone’s best interests at heart, she’s not quite perfect, and her mistakes have consequences.
In fact, none of the characters are perfect, and that’s because Beagle creates believable, flawed, human (for the most part) people who are a mess of contradictions and hangups. They’re at their most polite when dealing with people they loathe, and when they’re in pain they lash out at whoever’s in the best position to help. They resist doing something that would make them happy because happiness can be scary if it’s different from anything they’ve done before. If they do try something new, then they refuse to include the people closest to them because, damnit, they don’t want to share. And they make spur-of-the moment, careless, stupid mistakes that can’t ever be taken back.
The word I’ve seen used most often to describe this book is bittersweet, and that works because this definitely isn’t a fairytale, follow-your-dreams, happily-ever-after story. If Beagle has a message here then it’s mostly left up to the reader. Is it that people should beware of giving up their dreams in exchange for a comfortable life? Is it a cautionary tale about how choosing something new will always mean not choosing something else? Or is it a gentle reminder to embrace the sadness we feel when we leave something behind, since that’s the only way to know we’re moving forward?
The ending is sweet and rather sad, mythical and mundane, and hard to pin down. Which to me sounds like Peter S. Beagle’s writing in a nutshell.
The cover art is by Magdalena Korzeniewska, who has a an online gallery of paintings here, and a Deviantart account here. She’s a BIG fan of George R.R. Martin, if you happen to be looking for any Game of Thrones fan art.