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Tag Archives: Nantucket

Family Snapshots: Summer of ’69

24 Monday Feb 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1969, anti-Semitism, bigotry, book review, cultural appropriation, Elin Hilderbrand, false redemption, family dynamics, historical fiction, Nantucket, shallow characterization, the Sixties, Vietnam War

Review: Summer of ’69, by Elin Hilderbrand
Little, Brown, 2019. 418 pp. $28

For Kate Foley Levin, the annual family pilgrimage in summer 1969 to her mother’s home in Nantucket will feel sparse and lonely. Her only son has been drafted and is an infantry grunt in Vietnam; any moment, she expects the telegram announcing his death. Kate responds by withdrawing to finds solace in the bottle. Meanwhile, her eldest, pregnant daughter can’t leave Boston to join the family, for her due date is weeks away, and she’s too uncomfortable to travel. Said daughter also suspects her geeky MIT husband, who consults for the Apollo space program, is cheating on her. The next eldest daughter, a contentious soul, has annoyed Kate by making a mess of college and getting arrested at protest marches. But she won’t be there to bother anyone, because she has a job on Martha’s Vineyard, where, unbeknownst to Mom, she falls for a Harvard man who happens to be black.

Jessie Levin, half-sister to these siblings (her father, David, is Kate’s second husband) needs her mother more than ever. Just turned thirteen, she feels utterly bereft without her family, especially her half-brother, to whom she’s very close. She’s also fighting several losing battles, most notably with her bigoted, vicious grandmother, Exalta, which Kate might have helped with, but forget that. One firefight concerns Jessie’s identification with her (purely cultural) Jewishness, a link she shares with her father; she’s freaked out that Exalta’s an anti-Semite.

So we’ve got the Vietnam War, to which the Levins and Foleys are opposed, and a son at risk. We have possible marital infidelity, alcoholism, political protest, interracial romance, and anti-Semitism. As if that weren’t enough, we have sexual and physical abuse, feminism, Jessie’s sexual awakening, and abortion. And oh, yes, Jessie’s reading The Diary of Anne Frank for school. Summer of ’69 purports to be beach reading, but that’s one hell of a load.

Neil Armstrong’s photograph of Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface, July 21, 1969 (courtesy NASA, via Wikimedia Commons)

What we don’t have is the Sixties — the lingo, the vibe, the sense that this was an unusual decade, the belief that so much was possible yet so much was wrong, and that you felt compelled to take sides and make a statement. Hilderbrand shows none of that. She’s strong on fashion, issues, and headlines, but those are period details, museum exhibits. The summer of 1969 was my last before my senior year of high school, so we share a fascination for that moment (she was born that July). But, much as I enjoy re-creations of that time and salute her attempt, I don’t think she gets it.

In her favor, she can keep the pages turning. She’s a keen observer of family dynamics, and she manages to thread several narratives without missing a stitch. In her world, people don’t talk to each other, and the closer they are by blood, the less they say, because they have secrets to hide. She also has a friendly, drop-in-for-a-chat-dear-reader tone that makes her narrative pleasant company, like an easy-listening radio station.

But Hilderbrand’s ease cuts two ways. Despite the pain the characters suffer and the issues she raises, which couldn’t be more momentous, the treatment feels one-dimensional, like posed family snapshots. Everything seems too far away to hurt anybody for real. With so much simmering conflict and so little honesty, you’d think more would explode, and that’s why I finished the book. I wanted to know how Hilderbrand would resolve these conflicts—and I now know I wandered into Never-Never Land.

One problem’s the characterization. Kate’s controlling and craven by turns, and it’s not clear why. David’s a good guy with no depth, and the older sisters represent themes but lack compelling internal lives. Jesse’s the only character who seems reflective about what matters:

Jessie thought all grown-ups lived in a different atmosphere, one that was like a cool, clear gel. Adults had problems, Jessie knew — money and their children — but one of the benefits of reaching adulthood, she thought, was that you outgrew the raw, hot, chaotic emotions of adolescence.

Yet this girl, intelligent and emotionally tuned in, gets upset that Anne Frank dies; she thinks the book shouldn’t have ended like that. The Holocaust! Who knew? Hilderbrand warps her narrative up, down, and sideways to let her characters find redemption and forgiveness and throws in the world’s most famous Holocaust victim, as though Anne defined those values. But don’t get me started on writers who co-opt a Jewish girl as a Christian saint, a Joan of Arc who turned the other cheek–a travesty encouraged, in part, by Anne’s father, who sanitized his daughter’s diary for publication.

Let’s stay with Jessie, a perceptive, nominally Jewish child whose brother’s in the Viet Cong’s crosshairs. Her heart’s been broken, and she has a sense of painful reality, even if she doesn’t always understand the why or how. Maybe she unconsciously connects her brother’s fate with Anne’s. They’re both so good; how can they die?

That’s a worthy question, but Hilderbrand doesn’t stay there. Having shown how bad things can almost happen to good people, she bails them out by snapping her authorial fingers, relieving them of the hard work of living. Maybe that’s what a beach book is supposed to do, keep you at a distance from work. But in relying on that illusion of substance, Summer of ’69 trivializes its subject matter.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Keeping Focus: The Movement of Stars

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1845, Amy Brill, astronomy, characterization, feminism, historical fiction, Nantucket, navigation, nineteenth century, Quakers, whaling, women

Review: The Movement of Stars, by Amy Brill
Riverhead, 2013. 388 pp. $28

Hannah Price wants the moon, or, to be precise (and she values precision above all else), a comet. A Quaker woman living on Nantucket in 1845, Hannah scans the skies nightly, searching for a comet that no one else has catalogued. If she succeeds, she’ll win a prize from the king of Denmark, but Hannah’s not looking for fame (though the prize money would come in handy). Rather, she dreams of contributing to scientific knowledge.

On Nantucket, or anywhere in 1845, this isn’t the path women are supposed to follow, especially Quaker women. Hannah has a little leeway, because her father is an astronomer; they repair and adjust chronometers for the ships that come to port, the island’s economic lifeblood. Better yet, her former teacher, the influential Dr. Hall, has encouraged her brilliance at mathematics and science. However, men are always the ones to decide what she can do, and where. And since her mother died when she was very young, her only ally is her twin brother Edward, now away at sea.

U. S. Coast Survey chart including Nantucket, 1857 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

U. S. Coast Survey chart including Nantucket, 1857 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Into this delicate balance steps Isaac Martin, a whaling crew member to whom Hannah offers lessons in celestial navigation. Their friendship sets tongues wagging, especially since Isaac comes from the Azores and is dark-skinned. Unlike its Ohio counterpart in The Last Runaway (April 23), the Friends Meeting of Nantucket is firmly abolitionist, though hardly more tolerant. Hannah risks being kicked out of Meeting (and suffering her father’s discipline) by having social relations with a nonbeliever, proper though these relations are–for the moment.

The Movement of Stars is worth reading for its protagonist. Hannah is a very difficult person, for whom the only ready emotion is anger, and who sees slights everywhere. That she’s often correct doesn’t obscure how socially inept she is, even cruel. She’s more than dimly aware that her inability to make chitchat or contribute to the necessary social grease has cost her. Brill has done superbly here, creating sympathy for an unpleasant outcast, no mean feat. That Hannah also learns to see more clearly, extending her search for the truth of the heavens to those of human interaction, is another masterstroke. Yet she never gives up her anger at being thwarted or manipulated by men, even those she loves, and I admire her unwillingness to compromise what she believes. Against her will and love of precision, toward the end, she reluctantly concludes that “two competing Truths could in fact coexist in one mind.” (By the way, F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that this ability was the test of a first-rate intelligence. It’s one of my favorite quotes.)

Unfortunately, the rest of The Movement of Stars doesn’t live up to its heroine. None of the other characters seem full to me; I’m disappointed in Dr. Hall and Hannah’s father, Nathaniel, who feel like straw men, at times. Brill tries to suggest more, and I like Hannah’s confusion about their motives, but I’m confused too. Most importantly, I can’t grasp Isaac, who reads like a stock character–the taciturn, down-to-earth sailor whose homespun wisdom turns Hannah’s life around. I believe her attraction for him, all right, for what he represents, and the internal struggle she has over the pull he exerts seems real and significant. But Isaac assumes that any hesitations she has about him must be due to race or class prejudice alone, which makes him the only man in the novel who gets away with ignoring the barriers she faces as a woman.

There’s one other way in which The Movement of Stars loses focus, and that’s the prose. The last few chapters stray from the nineteenth century in tone and manner, as when Nathaniel says, “Thy travels have certainly impacted thee.” Whoops. To be sure, it’s a first novel, and an accomplished one. But it’s fair to ask how Brill, skilled at observing interactions, would tell, tell, tell: “When she was near him, Hannah felt both exhilarated and free at the same time, the way she felt when she was observing. The idea of parting from him was excruciating.” That reads like shorthand, not characterization.

That said, I still recommend The Movement of Stars. Not only is Hannah a fascinating character, I liked reading about the whaling and Quaker communities (highly intertwined) of Nantucket.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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