The Summer Guest
by Justin Cronin
A Novel of Fish and Fishermen
A review by Anna Stein
In The Summer Guest, three generations of Maine folk stumble over each other in their efforts to honor the wishes of a dying man and to save the family business, a fishing camp. Five different narrators, each burdened with a personal tragedy, tell the story of how the camp came to be the centerpiece of their lives — each investing himself or herself, willingly or unwillingly, in its survival.
There's the young caretaker who volunteers to spend winters snowed in and completely alone; a reluctant Vietnam draft evader who, after hiding out in Canada, inherits the fishing camp from his father and spends his life "trying to learn what it means to be brave"; his wife, a good-hearted woman who stands by her man even when he abandons her for years; their daughter, a smart and witty medical student who pieces together the family secret that begins with her birth; and the novel's wild card, such as it is, an old financier who has surprised the others (if not us) on his death bed with several last wishes. Sure, the characters are hokey. (Holding a fancy new drill, one character informs us that "once you hold something like that in your hand, part of you marries it forever.") But despite the fundamental, sometimes sickening decency of the narrators (even the rich guy is nice; it seems as though he amassed his fortune by mistake), it is hard not to care about how (not whether) all these family arrangements will fall into place.
And it's the twists that make this novel worth finishing: a surprise bequest, a child's death, a brush with mortality on a fishing trip. With a plot so well-executed and eventful, you won't even notice when the surprises turn out to be, well, no big surprise.
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