Tove Jansson swimming in the Gulf of Finland.
Have you ever packed a nice thick hardback novel (fresh from the bestseller list) for your long-haul vacation — and then wanted to throw it into the sea when it didn’t live up to the blurbers’ rapturous ditties? That’s why I hardly ever bring a new (or even new-ish) novel on vacation: there’s just too much riding on it. The perfect novel for a trip where luggage space is tight has to have a proven track record, so at least if I don’t fall in love with it there will be something worthwhile in there to parse out.
Choosing a stack of books for summer is especially perilous for my picky little brain, considering I rarely want to read about heat, especially the sticky blacktop of city streets. Heat, with its attendant discomfort, is what I long to escape. But then again, when I’m near the sea with the ocean beckoning me in for a cooling off at any moment, there is something inviting about a character’s band sweat on their shirt collar. Reading isn’t only escapism, but being carried away by a novel is perhaps reading’s most pleasant side effect.
That said, I don’t particularly care for the term “beach reads”; not because I avoid reading at the beach or have any other grumpy affectations to put on, but because the phrase, in its contemporary meaning, winnows out so much of the good stuff in an effort to keep readers from overtaxing themselves. A satisfying novel can have momentum and style, a little drag and enough buoyancy to move you along its currents.
Here, five novels that just reek of summer to me, that have wind in the trees and crashing white surf, dusty plains and verdant islands — all of them underloved classics.
1. The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard (1990)
On five subsequent visits to England (I really like England), I bought each installment of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s intricate, delightful series about the sprawling Cazalet family. (The novels are available in the U.S., but a bit harder to find here, and there’s something pleasurable about buying and reading a book in its place of origin.) Howard’s quintet (published between 1990 and 2013) oozes British bucolic from every one of its several thousand total pages. At the rambling Home Place, situated among the hills and forests of Sussex, the Cazalets — grandparents, brothers and their wives, a “spinster” sister (read it and you’ll get the joke), a baker’s dozen of grandkids — hunkers down in the last months of peace in 1939 and, as the series progresses, make their way through war and death, adolescence and maturation, new love and stoppered ambition. You could start with The Light Years in June, move through Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off, and wrap up with All Change this August, and have spent your summer wisely.
2. Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (1987)
Read Wallace Stegner! Share him with your friends! Don’t let his ranking as a great American writer slip entirely away! And start with Crossing to Safety, one of those long, deep, transportive novels that reads like a resurrection of a bygone country. Larry and Sally Morgan meet Sid and Charity Lang when they’re young academic couples at a small university in Wisconsin; they turn into the sort of lifelong friends that live always in relation to one another, forming a sort of communal traveling family. But when we meet them they’re in the last days of their foursome: it’s August of 1972, Charity is dying, and the couples have gathered at the Langs’ compound in the Vermont’s resplendent Northeast Kingdom, where the air is like “hot gold,” to escort her out of this world. Crossing to Safety then slips back in time to explain how their bonds were forged and strengthened over decades. The novel chronicles their successes and failures, ordinary (if highly intellectual) lives made fresh and appealing by the immaculate attention to emotional detail that Stegner does so well. He’s the kind of novelist who has been copied so assiduously that his style, with its glorious love for American landscapes, will feel instantly familiar. But somewhere, a few dozen pages in, you’ll realize that few since have treated their characters and his craft with as much dignity as Stegner.
3. Bear by Marian Engel (1976)
Lou is a librarian sent to a tiny, one-house island in the north of Canada to inventory a dead gentleman’s estate over the course of a summer. The bear is a local specimen that has seemingly always inhabited the island. In this brief, languorous novel the human and the creature form a bond swimming in the river together and then sharing the lamplight of the drawing room at night. But eventually (and famously, for Bear is the kind of book that is rediscovered by feminist critics every 10 years or so) Lou takes the bear as her lover, finally finding physical pleasure in a life that long leaned ascetic. Yes, the librarian and the bear consummate their relationship, an idea you are currently repelled by, but I promise that when it happens mid-Bear you’ll revel in Lou’s ecstasy. “A book of perfect female delight,” I wrote in the margin years ago when I first read it.
4. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (1972)
There’s one particular photograph of Tove Jansson that I look at every June (see above). In it she’s swimming in the sea off the tiny island of Klovharu in the Gulf of Finland, her gray bob crowned with flowers and a giant grin on her face. Behind her sits the small house she built by hand with her girlfriend Tooti: it isn’t exactly the one she describes in The Summer Book, but it has the same air of long days and bobbing wildflowers and complete kinship with the Nordic wild. The Summer Book is a series of 22 vignettes about 6-year-old Sophia and her aging grandmother set over one metamorphic summer; the two build Venetian lagoons in the marshes and watch a rich businessman put up a house, they dance around each other’s grief in the midst of the loss of Sophia’s mother. Both are wonderfully drawn. Sophia is the kind of child who writes a note that reads “I hate you. With warm personal wishes, Sophia,” and her grandmother the sort who refutes the existence of hell by declaring, “You can see for yourself that life is hard enough without being punished for it afterwards.” The Summer Book TK.
5. The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor (2002)
The Story of Lucy Gault is just over 200 pages but impossible to read in one sitting: it’s a tummy-rumbler, which I don’t say to put you off it, but rather to lure you into its unsettling charm. Set over a lifetime, the novel begins when eight-year-old Lucy’s English parents decide to flee their home on Ireland’s coast in the early summer of 1921, fearing themselves targets of local rebels in the wake of Bloody Sunday. Determined to stay, Lucy runs away through the woods, where the worst kind of misunderstanding separates her from her parents, perhaps for life. In gentle, distant, psychologically astute prose, Lucy Gault hits a seemingly impossible selection of major notes: it’s a commentary on the establishment of the modern Irish state, a portrait of the dutiful figures that once propped up small-town life, a cruel love story, and a nail-biter. Trevor is a master of the rhythms of ordinary life, the kind of fiction writer whose asides about washing pots and scything grass hold as much tension as discordant romances.
Endpapers
There was once a very cool Tove Jansson line from the Swedish fashion line Market, but alas I missed it.
Jennifer Higgie’s newest book, about female artists whose work brushed up against the occult and other mysticisms, won’t be out in the U.S. until January 2024, but do the smart thing and buy yourself a British copy now.
If you have a little girl and don’t know about Chirri & Chirra, the rosy-cheeked Japanese twins who wander into fantastical natural lands in Kaya Doi’s picture books, I suggest you invest in the whole set.
Well dammit, this chair looks perfect for reading. ($$$)
Second Story books in DC is a reliable source for the Cazalet Chronicles. If pressed, would you concede that All Change is inexplicably inferior (I’m in the middle of it) or is that just me?