Summery Reading, Part I: Heatwave, Summer Fridays

Here we are between short, bearable heat waves. As the climate changes, I’m more grateful than ever to live somewhere with reasonably mild and predictable weather; I don’t miss the swampy humidity of the Maryland summers I grew up with one bit. Today I have some brief thoughts on a first pair of summer-themed reads I picked up last month: a queasy coming-of-age novella about French teenagers’ self-destructive actions on a camping holiday; and a fun, nostalgic romance novel set in New York City at the turn of the millennium.

Heatwave by Victor Jestin (2019; 2021)

[Translated from the French by Sam Taylor]

Victor Jestin was in his early twenties when he wrote this debut novella, which won the Prix Femina des Lycéens and was longlisted for the CWA Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger. It opens, memorably, with Leonard’s confession: “Oscar is dead because I watched him die and did nothing. He was strangled by the ropes of a swing … Oscar was not a child. At seventeen, you don’t die like that by accident.” A suicide, then: fitting given the other dangerous behaviours – drinking and promiscuity – rife among the gang of teenagers at this campsite in the South of France. What turns it into a crime is that Leonard, addled by alcohol and the heat, doesn’t report the death but buries Oscar in the sand and pretends nothing happened.

The rest of the book takes place over about 24 hours, the final day of a two-week vacation. Leo stumbles about as if in a trance, outwardly relating to his family, a male friend who seems to have a crush on him, and girls he’d like to sleep with, but all the while inwardly wondering what to do next. “I hadn’t made many stupid mistakes in my seventeen years of life. This one was difficult to understand. It all happened too fast; I felt powerless.” This is interesting enough if you like unreliable teenage narrators or are drawn by the critics’ comparisons to Françoise Sagan – accurate for the sense of sleepwalking toward disaster. One could easily breeze through the 104 pages during one hot afternoon. It didn’t stand out to me particularly, though. (Little Free Library)

Summer Fridays by Suzanne Rindell (2024)

I was a big fan of Rindell’s first two stylish historical novels, The Other Typist and Three-Martini Lunch. She seemed to go off the boil with the next two, which I skipped, and now she’s back with an unexpected foray into romance, a genre I almost never read. The cover’s whimsical (nonexistent) birds and Ryan Gosling-like male figure make the novel seem frothier than it actually is, though we’re definitely in classic romcom territory here. The comparisons to You’ve Got Mail are apt in that the main character, Sawyer, strikes up a flirtation over e-mail and instant messaging. She’s a New York City publishing assistant whose ambitions threaten her day job when she has several poems accepted by The Paris Review. Nick, her correspondent, teases and cheers her on in equal measure. The complicated thing is that Sawyer is engaged to Charles, her college sweetheart, and Nick is dating Kendra. Nick and Sawyer initially became digital pen pals because they suspected that their partners, who work together at a law firm, were having an affair; they never expected sparks to fly.

It’s overlong and reasonably predictable, but I enjoyed the languid unfolding of the romance over the weeks of summer 1999. It was truly a simpler time when you had to dial up and wait for an inbox to load instead of having it in your pocket 24/7. Every Friday afternoon, Sawyer and Nick do touristy things like taste-test hotdogs and slushees, ride the Staten Island ferry back and forth all day, and visit little-known bars and restaurants Nick knows through his amateur rock band. They try to convince themselves that these are not dates. It’s like time outside of time for them, and a chance to sightsee in one’s own town. Eventually, though, Sawyer has to face reality. The 2001 framing story reflects the fact that, after the events of 9/11, many asked themselves what they really wanted out of life. This was cute but doesn’t quite live up to, e.g., Romantic Comedy. (Read via Edelweiss)