“mirth, melancholy, and redemption”

In Summerlong by Dean Bakopoulos, the residents of a small Midwestern college town are experiencing one of the hottest summers on record.

Don Lowry, a real estate agent with two kids, despite memorizing three new jokes every Sunday night, doesn’t find life funny anymore.

As one of the characters tells Don, “You’re at the hardest time of life, Don. Midlife is when you have to accept what you’ve created, knowing that the life you have is the only one you will live.”

His wife Claire, a novelist experiencing writer’s block, is also struggling with that realization. She’s also become disenchanted with married life. Not helping matters is her discovery that Don has neglected to tell her their house has entered foreclosure.

Over the course of the summer, Don and Claire both latch on to a different twenty-something, who find themselves, in turn, gravitating towards each other.

Grieving the loss of her first love, ABC has come back to her college town and found a job caring for a widow named Ruth. In her downtime, ABC finds comfort in getting high with the man whose face she sees on FOR SALE signs all over town, “Don Lowry!”

Abandoning his acting career, Charlie has returned home to clear out his father’s study in the hopes of finding the novel he supposedly spent years writing. After a chance meeting in a convenience store parking lot, Charlie offers Claire the use of his swimming pool. In other words, an escape. 

Although there isn’t much action (apart from a certain kind),  Bakopoulos' writing is engaging, and the dialogue sometimes uncomfortably real. And the character of Ruth, who’s a little older and wiser, provides some much needed perspective with her almost magical prescience.   

Reminiscent of a John Updike story, Summerlong features adults in the grips of middle age malaise behaving badly. In this story, too, the pool is also abandoned, for a last-ditch vacation to Lake Superior. Sometimes a change of scenery is necessary to either revive a relationship or perhaps finally put it to rest.