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The
Summer Guest by Justin Cronin Rating: •••• (Recommended) |
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Restoration Justin
Cronin’s new book, The Summer
Guest, is the finest novel I’ve read this year. Set in a rural fishing
camp in Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter Four, “ Why
Harry’s weird insistence on a dry fly? The fact is, there’s a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it
comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat. We’ve had folks up
here who would fish only for salmon, and then only in the rivers; folks who
wouldn’t spit on a smallmouth but would marry a trout if they could. There’s
the old bamboo vs. graphite argument, of course, the high-tech crowd and the
low-tech crowd; for every well-heeled investment banker who shows up with a
custom-made graphite cannon and enough hand-tied flies to make a down payment
on a condo in Vail, there’s always another (we call him “the professor,”
whether or not that’s what he does, though it usually is) who fishes for
“historical accuracy” (I kid you not), marching around the woods with a
twelve-foot twig and a copy of Walton’s The Compleat
Angler, which, if you haven’t read it and don’t mind the bad spelling,
should come in pretty handy if you’re ever in seventeenth-century England
with some free time to fish. But if you’ve been around the sport
awhile, and learned it from someone who mostly understood it as an
interesting way to catch fish—in my case, my stepfather Vince, an agent for
the Maine Department of Conservation—then you understand the nonsense for
what it is: one more way for difficult people to be difficult. This is half
the fun for them, and since my job is, more or less, to keep everybody happy,
far be it from me to object. If you want to fish in period costume, I’ll be
the first one to fetch your knickers at the cleaners. Still, Harry’s insistence on fishing
only dry fly had me stumped. To be sure, the dry fly/wet fly debate is the
oldest aesthetic fistfight in the sport, and nearly every year some joker
writes an article in one of the trades defending the “purity” of dry fly and
generally insinuating that fishing with a nymph or streamer is just one step
above putting a chunk of Velveeta on a diaper pin. But Harry was never one to
care about such things. It’s possible to like both well enough, as Harry always
had, letting the fish, the water, the weather, and the time of year make his
choice for him—allowing circumstances to give shape to his pleasure, always
the best way to go in my view, and probably the closest thing I have to a
philosophy of life. That Harry wanted to go trout fishing one last time, but
do it all wrong, amounted to a kind of dare. Maybe all he wanted, away from
the drugs and the doctors and even the cancer itself, was one last, nifty
stroke of luck before the curtain came down. Harry and his family weren’t the only
guests at the camp; we were pretty close to full up, and taking a whole day
off to guide him would require a little planning. After we’d gotten their
gear to the cabin, Kate and I went to the office in the main lodge to sort
through the list of duties for the next day. It was going to be a squeeze;
we had two parties checking out and three new ones coming in, and half a
dozen folks from the Lakeland Inn, the only hotel in town, arriving in the
early A.M. for breakfast and a moose-watching canoe-float down the river,
picnic lunch included. This was a regular Saturday staple for us, and a money
loser at thirty-five bucks a head, but with a healthy payoff at the back end,
since half the folks who took the trip fell in love with the place and
returned the next year for a week at full price. A word or two about Kate. I had known
Kate for eight years, since she was thirteen and I first came to the camp,
and apart from one awkward, early summer, there’d been no nonsense between
us. You could say there was a certain logic to the
idea that we might eventually take a personal interest in one another, but
there were also lots of reasons not to. I got along just great with Joe and
Lucy, who treated me like family, and I knew that they’d borrowed up to their
necks to send her to tony old Bowdoin
and had hopes for her life that probably included a bright young
anesthesiologist or management consultant in Boston, not some up-country
hermit like me. But the truth was, and despite my
better judgment, I’d begun to think about her differently—think about her all
the time. What I mean is, I’d begun to see her not just as Joe and Lucy’s
daughter but as a person in her own right, and I missed being near her, the
sound of her voice and the way she tucked her hair behind her ears and the
feeling these things gave me, like the world wasn’t such a big place after
all, and I was someone in it. The last winter away from her was like a kind
of cold storage, and for a couple of snowbound weeks in February, I’d even
gotten it into my head to drive the Jeep down to Bowdoin,
surprise her at her dorm, maybe whisk her off for a weekend down the coast
or holed up in Boston, totally rearranging my life and, if I were lucky,
hers. This, of course, was the loneliness talking, and naturally I didn’t do
it; I knew she had boyfriends at Bowdoin, and I
sensed I belonged to one compartment of her life and could not easily pass
into the other. What could I do? I put the idea aside like a book I knew
wouldn’t end well and stayed put. All of which guaranteed that by the
time Kate returned to the camp in June, I had it something awful for her. I
was so worried that she would detect my feelings (or worse, that her parents
would) that I barely set foot from my cabin until the Fourth of July, leaving
only to do my chores and then running like a rabbit straight back to lie on
my cot and brood away the hours. I could tell Lucy was on to me; she kept
asking me if I were coming down with something, and once or twice hinted that
Kate was worried too. The only thing I could think to say was that maybe the
winters had started to get to me. The truth was, I had decided the only
proper thing to do—a funny word, but the right one—was quit at the end of the
summer. But where I’d go and what I’d do, I hadn’t the faintest idea. In the meantime, we had a day’s chores
to plan, and in the cluttered office, Kate and I went over the schedule. We
were pinning our hopes on a staggered arrival for the moose-canoers; if push came to shove, we could delay a group or
two in the dining hall so that Kate would have time to drive back from the
put-in point, five miles upstream and a forty-minute round-trip, going like a
comet. We had just about put everything together when Joe came in, with Hal
in tow. I wasn’t surprised; clearly there was a pow-wow
brewing, and I had a few questions myself about Harry, since I had figured
out by then that any fishing we might do would be a total fabrication. Hal gave
my upper arm a solid pat and asked how I was doing, but his face was creased
with worry. He said hello to Kate, asked her in a chummy way how things were
going down at Bowdoin (Hal was a Williams grad
himself, and to look at him, probably a letterman who had banged Bowdoin heads aplenty), then let Joe show him to the old
plaid sofa. “Let’s all sit,” Joe said. “Kate, why
don’t you stay too. This concerns you as much as
anyone.” We arranged our chairs in a circle,
while Joe did the next, obvious thing, which was to produce a half-full
bottle of very old single malt from the rolltop. He
took four coffee mugs from the shelf above the desk, gave each one a hard
blow to clean the dust out before pouring the Scotch, then passed the cups
around. I swirled the Scotch under my nose, and it smelled just like its
color: the luminous brown of old, old wood. “Am I to take it,” Kate said, looking
into her mug, “that this means something is up?” Joe shushed her with a frown, sipped
from his drink, and nodded in my direction. “Jordan, Hal here has something
to tell you.” Hal set his drink down on the table to
his right and gave his knees a little slap. “Well. I guess the upshot is, my father is dying. The particulars aren’t important,
Jordan, but the doctors say he’s very close to the end. It makes no sense at
all for him to be here, and I tried to talk him out of it, but he’s fished
here thirty years and that’s what he wants to do. He was actually in the
hospital until yesterday morning, when the doctor called and told us he was
checking himself out. He’d pretty much decided what he wanted to do, and
there’s no law saying you have to stay in the hospital if you don’t want to.
Sally’s out of town, so it was all I could do to get January at the day care
and hightail it up here.” Hal paused and rubbed his face, dusted with a
day-old growth of silvering beard. “ “I’d feel the same,” I said, thinking: Attaboy, Harry. Hang a sign on the hospital room door, a
silly picture of some old geezer bagging carp, and the words Gone fishing.
“If it were up to me, I’d say let him do it.” Hal took his Scotch from the table,
seemed about to sip, then stopped. “I’m not sure, “It’s okay,
Hal,” I said. “I’m happy to do it. You don’t need to worry.” “Like I said, just understand how sick
he is. And, in case you were wondering, I don’t know what to make of this dry
fly business any more than you do. I suspect it doesn’t much matter. Just
getting something in the water would be a pretty neat trick for him.” I looked across the room at Kate,
sitting on a folding chair by the cold woodstove, but she was watching Hal,
and I couldn’t catch her eye. “Maybe he just wants to make a few of
the rules,” I said. “Maybe that’s it,” Hal said, though I
could tell he didn’t think so. “Like I said, he’s relying on you to
understand some things I don’t.” Here he looked at Joe, who seemed to nod. “I’ll do my best, Hal,” I said. “Is
that it?” “Actually, no,” Joe said. He silenced
me with a raised hand. “Hang on, Hal leaned forward on the sofa. He
looked at the tips of his fingers, then back up at me. “The other thing I
have to tell you, So there it was, and the first thing I
thought was: mystery solved. Then: Buying the camp. Leaving it to me. In his
will? Yes, in his will, in the last will and testament of one Harrison
Wainwright, he of Business Week and Fortune and the Forbes 500
and all the rest, inventor of the deep-discount pharmaceutical superstore: that
Harrison Wainwright. A chain of ideas so completely unlikely, so crazy,
in fact, that I couldn’t, just then, open my mouth and say a blessed word.
And—a sudden intuition—I glanced up at the clock to note the time: 9:03 P.M.
Sunday, August 19, 1994, at a little after nine on a fine, cold evening in
the North Woods of Maine. “So?” Joe tapped my knee with the back
of his hand. “ “Jesus, Joe.” I looked back at Hal.
“He’s leaving it to me?” “That’s right, I nodded. I was actually barely
following any of it. “I guess I do.” “Incidentally, he doesn’t want you to
know about this. My thinking is—and Sally and Frances both agree—it’s crazy
for you not to. There are no strings attached, and you can do whatever you
want with the place. But what he’s hoping is that the camp will always be
here, that you can stay up here the rest of your life. He wants to take care
of you, Jordan.” I turned to Joe. “You really sold it?” Joe shrugged, turning his mouth down in
a pained half-frown. I thought he might be about to cry, and who could blame
him? Even if Harry had given him one zillion dollars for the place, the camp
had been in Joe’s family for almost fifty years. My eyes moved upward to the
wall behind his head, covered with old photos, including a faded
black-and-white of Joe himself, just a kid of six or seven with one front
tooth missing and a haircut that looked like it had been done with pinking
shears, holding up an Atlantic salmon just about as big as he was and beaming
like a maniac. Joe Sr., the old man himself, stood beside his boy, one hand
over his brow, the other, big as a catcher’s mitt, tousling little Joe’s
hair. The photo was taken on the dock below the lodge; I guessed it was Joe’s
mother, Amy, who had taken it. Looking at the picture, I knew without being
told that it was one of the happiest moments of Joe’s life, as this was one
of the saddest. “He gave me a fair price. More than
fair. You know that Lucy and I have been thinking about selling for a while,
anyway.” The corner of his mouth gave a tiny twitch, his eyes glazed over
with a thin film of tears, and I would have moved heaven and earth at that
moment to let him know that, basically, I loved him. He put his cup to his
lips and drained the Scotch in one hard swallow. “I’m just glad we didn’t
have to sell it to the loggers. Or someone who would carve it up.” “I won’t, Joe. Jesus. I absolutely
won’t.” “We know you won’t,” Hal said. “That is,”
he said, “the point.” I looked at Kate, sitting cross-legged
in her chair and watching us. In her hand, her cup was tipped at an angle
that told me it was empty, but I couldn’t read her face. “You knew?” “Some of it.” She nodded. “That the
camp had been sold.” I thought about what she was saying.
“But not the rest.” “That it’s yours?” Her eyebrows rose.
“I’d have to say no. That I didn’t know.” “And is it okay?” “Hell, “I don’t rightly know.” And I didn’t.
As far as I could tell, everybody had gotten just what they wanted, without
even asking. “This is going to take a while to sink in,” I said. Hal rose from the couch, and I noticed
for the first time how tall he was, nearly a full head taller than Joe, or
his own father. He fixed his eyes on me, squinting a little in the weak,
yellow light of the office. “It’s a lot to think about. But it’s all right to
be happy, too, Jordan. It’s a great gift.” Which was, of course, precisely true. That’s exactly what it was. I said, “Thank you.” He gave me a weary grin. I thought he
was about to shake my hand, sealing the bargain, but instead he fixed one
hand on my shoulder and gave it a
squeeze. “You’re welcome, Cronin
is a fine writer, and The Summer
Guest is a novel that will bring a lot of reading pleasure. Steve
Hopkins, September 25, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Summer Guest.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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