Justin Cronin's ”The Summer Guest": A Masterful Piece of Fiction

The Summer Guest by Justin Cronin
Hardcover, 369 pages
Publisher: The Dial Press
Price: $24
Publication Date: 2004


In the North Woods of Maine, there is a campground situated in the pines. It’s secluded and untouched by the sands of time, a haven for the tenderest of intimacies, a site that can salvage a shattered soul. This special place is backdrop to Justin Cronin’s captivating new novel, The Summer Guest.

The novel’s four principal characters narrate this beautifully written drama of loving, losing and loyalty. Each of them shares their stories in their own chapters. There is Harry Wainwright, a terminally ill, ultra-wealthy businessman. There’s 30-year-old Jordan Patterson, the camp’s fishing guide and winter caretaker. Rounding out the quartet are Joe and Lucy Crosby, husband-and-wife owners of the camp. A fifth and vital character named Kate—The Crosby’s 21-year-old daughter who figures prominently in the characters’ chronicles—narrates a single, decisive chapter.

This method of storytelling—first-person point of view—is a hard-won writing technique, especially when a writer brings multiple characters into the mix. Ensuring that these characters’ tone and idiosyncrasies remain consistent from chapter to chapter requires expertise. Fiction writers who do it well—as Cronin does—create individualized characters who speak directly to you in their own unique voices.

For example, Lucy may narrate an 11-page chapter, in which she relates the flowering of her love affair with Joe, and not appear again for another 60-odd pages. When she picks up her story, you must feel that it is Lucy speaking again— Lucy, with her secrets and heartfelt explanations —and not a carry-over from the previous chapter, which, say, Jordan may have related. If you do not detect an overlap, a melding of voices, then the writer deserves praise. Author Suzan-Lori Parks executed this kind of changeover in viewpoint to great effect in Getting Mother’s Body (2003). For it, she won comparison to William Faulkner. Cronin masters it, too.

And though he may not garner a Faulkneresque parallel, it’s only because of geography and an absent Deep South dialect. The Summer Guest is a Northern tale about Maine and Mainers, after all; and Cronin is as every bit successful at shifting point of view and creating characters with diverse dispositions as his distinguished predecessors.

The Summer Guest takes place in August 1994, and begins with the news that Harry Wainwright is near death and wishes to come to the camp to take one last fishing trip. Harry has been a guest for more than 30 summers. He’s fished there since JFK was in the White House and is, as Jordan says, one of the well-to-do “lifers [who] . . . are the bread and butter of a place like ours ... "

Jordan, Joe, Lucy and Kate are ready for Harry’s stay. They know of his dying wish and concede that the era of Harry Wainwright is coming to a close. Because he’s been a mainstay at the camp for years, Harry’s life is intricately intertwined with the lives of Lucy, Joe and Jordan. The three begin to tell of their experiences with Harry, and in the process they recount their past passions and relationships, disappointments, life-altering decisions and family breakdowns, where fathers play a crucial role. Harry, too, discloses his life history’s poignant recollections.

The characters are all acutely aware that they’re sharing their inner thoughts and divulging guarded memories. In fact, they tell you so: Jordan says, “Everybody has a story, so here is mine—the story of me and Kate and old Harry Wainwright, and the lake and woods where all of this takes place”; Joe imparts, “I wanted . . . to find my life. This is exactly what happened, of course, and that is the part of the story in which Harry Wainwright played his part . . . .”; Lucy states, “There was . . . a cosmic symmetry that could not be refused . . . that was always folded into other loves, and that is the real story of me and Harry Wainwright”; and Harry confides, “I want to tell this story truly, so here it must be said that I also loved another, and how that came to pass: the story in which the married man with the sick wife and the son he does not love enough . . . because he is simply afraid to, permits himself the one, small present he is forbidden. The story in which he is not a hero, not at all."

You, as listener, become enraptured by these appealing characters and their emotional highs and lows. They show you how they’ve learned to love. They show you how they’ve lived with sorrow. They show you their courage and frailty. They give you honesty.

Their reminiscences take you to the 1960s, when Joe and Lucy are high school sweethearts and work summers together at the camp (then owned by Joe’s father) and Harry’s visits to this Maine get-away spot begin. You’re transported to the early `70s, when Harry’s wife, Meredith, dies of a rare disease; Joe avoids the Vietnam draft and jumps to Canada; and Lucy defies the parameters of her life, acknowledging that “never in my life had I done anything so purely on my own.” And, you are a part of this momentous August 1994, as Jordan prepares for Harry’s fishing trip and Kate realizes that she’s falling in love.

Lucy, Joe and Jordan bring you along as they travel to familiar Massachusetts locales, too. Boston and its Back Bay, Charles River, Storrow Drive and Beacon Hill. Cambridge’s Central Square and Harvard University. The former U.S. Army post at Fort Devens and Worcester also receive mention.

The Summer Guest has one villain who appears briefly, the malicious Hank Rogue. And apart from a group of raucous vacationing lawyers—a side storyline that Cronin presents proficiently—there are no finaglers, spoilers or malcontents. To call the novel wholesome is not to suggest that it is stilted or lacks provocative tension. It is graceful and unpretentious. It simply feels real.

Harry, Lucy, Joe, Jordan and Kate are memorable, colorful characters who want to take you into their confidence and seem to feel the better for it. As Harry says, “After so much time, how wonderful finally to say these things. It is as if I have been carrying a heavy suitcase for years and years, only to discover I can simply put it down.”

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in 2004.