Book club alert: 3 great novels for summer reading

Here are three great novels for summer reading.

3. Maine, by J. Courtney Sullivan

Maine, By J. Courtney Sullivan, Alfred A. Knopf, 385 pages

The Kellehers of Massachusetts wouldn't begin to know how to pack lightly: They're dragging around too much emotional baggage. And every summer, they haul it all up to Maine to their vacation home on three acres on Cape Neddick.

The land, which was won on a bet, became a tradition of canoeing and outdoor showers, eating cold chicken sandwiches in a car while watching bear cubs climb in dumpsters, and arguing viciously with the relatives.

Like her first novel, “Commencement,” J. Courtney Sullivan's Maine is told from the perspectives of four women.

Alice, the still-beautiful 83-year-old matriarch, goes to Mass every day and is nursing a tragedy from World War II – along with a drink. Alice also has another secret, one that launches the novel's superb second half.

Alice is the villain of the piece as far as Kathleen, the designated family flake, is concerned. Alice, who longed to be an artist in Paris and instead ended up a mother of three, can be breathtakingly nasty, especially to a resentful, less-pretty daughter. After her father's funeral 10 years ago, Kathleen had vowed never to return to Maine and moved to California to live with an aging hippie and be a worm farmer. (Yes, you read that correctly.) But her daughter, Maggie, has announced she's pregnant by her cocaine-using, unemployed boyfriend, and Kathleen is on her way.

Maggie, 32 and a writer, is in many ways the least interesting of the characters. (She also has absolutely no clue how thoroughly a tiny baby shreds a writing schedule.) Professionally successful, Maggie has lousy taste in men. (Exhibit A: Gabe, the father of her child.) Everyone keeps telling her she’ll just know when she meets the right man. “Maggie hated when people said that, as if ultimate rightness between two human beings were as easy to recognize as a plastic thermometer popping up from out of a turkey's bottom: perfect temperature achieved, you have now completed your mission, go forth and live in bliss. She was slightly suspicious that such certainty happened only to fairly simple people, nonthinkers.”

I found myself rushing through her sections to get back to Alice.

Ann Marie, Alice's daughter-in-law, is the most unexpected character. In most books she'd be the shallow, judgmental harpy her sister-in-law Kathleen believes she is. Instead, Sullivan makes her the most poignant. At this point in her marriage and motherhood, Ann Marie has given up on the real world and arrives in Maine with her dollhouse kit, determined to “create a world of beauty and order.”

It takes a while for all the characters to arrive in Maine, but when they do, the novel kicks beautifully into gear. Sullivan's dialogue has snap and wit, with the best lines reserved for Alice. When Maggie asks Alice how she and her husband met, Alice shoots back, “I hardly think that’s appropriate table conversation.” When they go out to dinner, she asks if her denim-clad granddaughter is going to change out of her “play clothes.”

“The problem with her children and grandchildren was simply that they wanted too terribly to be happy,” Alice thinks. “They were always in search of it, trying to better themselves, improve upon their current situation so that they might feel no pain. They thought every problem on earth could be solved by turning inward.”

Boston history, from the Cocoanut Grove fire to Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang and the fallout of the priest abuse scandal, is woven throughout “Maine,” as is what it means to be Irish Catholic. With its melancholy examination of faith and love tugging against its comic highs, Sullivan’s novel would make a wonderful book to take on vacation, but it doesn’t deserve to be simply dismissed as a beach read.

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