A Vietnam-era coming-of-age novel set in a fictional Long Island town during the summer after Katie, its 18-year-old protagonist and first-person narrator, finishes high school.
This is a new debut novel, and it’s probably the best one I’ve read since “The Shock of the Fall” by Nathan Filer. The Vietnam War as a background event, and the less-than-ubiquitous availability of contraception and abortion, make for higher stakes than are now usual in (Western) teenage lives, and there are plenty of shotgun marriages (for the girls) and psychological scars (for the once-boys who have returned from the war). These don’t feel at all contrived or unnatural in the context, though writing them down in a list might suggest melodrama. Katie herself was adopted from a teenage mother, an event she reflects on periodically throughout the events of the novel.
The story is constructed as a series of interconnected vignettes whose chronology is not exactly clear; the chapters occasionally refer to one another as past or future events. Although this might sound confusing, there are one or two sentences scattered through the book that make it clear the story is being told from a future perspective, and the uncertain chronology of the novel, together with the lingering cigarette (and joint) smoke and the summer sea air, combine to build up into a dreamy distant memory of adolescence that is both effective and affecting. I also like that the novel manages to evoke the idea of a recollected teenage summer as a kind of golden age, while simultaneously not shying away from the darker elements of the story. It’s quite a feat, and is managed using straightforward but evocative prose. A new novelist to keep an eye on.