Salt Water
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In the summer of 1963 I fell in love and my father drowned....
So begins this sweet, ominous novel by Charles Simmons. Set against an idyllic landscape of water, sand, and sky, it recounts in exquisite detail the momentous events of a boy's 16th summer that reveal to him the dark facts of adult passion. On Bone Point, an island off the New England coast, the boy's long, lazy days of boating and swimming are sharpened by a growing awareness of his charismatic father's infidelities. Add to this the presence of a flirtatious middle-aged woman and her beautiful 20-year-old daughter, who have rented the guesthouse, and the tale is set in motion. This tautly constructed novel is both startling and haunting—an irresistible story of memory, desire, and suspense.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Simmons, a former editor at the New York Times Book Review, made his name as a writer with a series of surreal comic novels, including Powdered Eggs and Wrinkles, but the present book, a coming-of-age novella, is a complete change of pace. Written in a spare masculine style, it is based loosely on Turgenev's classic First Love and is narrated by Michael Petrovich, who recalls the memorable summer of 1963 when he was 16 and when Mrs. Mertz and her beautiful daughter, Zina, rented a neighboring house on the East Coast offshore island of Bone Point. Michael's father is a handsome philanderer whose easygoing ways cause tension with his mother; meanwhile, Michael is trying to impress Zina while rejecting the cynical view of women offered by a worldly young friend. Matters come to a tragic head at the Labor Day party that ends this unsettling summer. Simmons's calm, detached telling of the tale, and the major role played by the strongly evoked ocean setting, make for an experience that seems more European than American, and it is interesting to note that this slight but telling book was first published, to enthusiastic reviews, in France.
