Jun 15, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS Siri Hustvedt
Picador
ISBN 978-0312570606
182 pages
$14
Reviewed by Nora Krug, who writes The Washington Post's monthly New in Paperback column. She can be reached at krugn(at symbol)washpost.com.
On its surface, Siri Hustvedt's new novel, "The Summer Without Men," appears to be a typical smart and sassy beach read aimed at women who feel bad about their necks. The title, sure to scare off most male readers, promises a "Thelma & Louise" feminist escape, or at least an extended girls' night out with a little yoga thrown in. But Hustvedt, whose previous books include the fiercely intellectual novel "The Sorrows of an American," aims higher. The result, a kind of post-modern chick-lit piece that weaves Kierkegaard and Freud into the story of a woman's reawakening, is both captivating and unsatisfying.
The narrator, Mia Fredrickson, is a likable 50-something poet, a self-deprecating New York neurotic prone to clever comments like "insanity is a state of profound self-absorption." When the book opens, Mia is herself in a profound state of self-absorption, at least temporarily, after learning that her husband of 30 years, a neuroscientist named Boris, has taken up with a colleague, a Frenchwoman (of course) with "limp but shiny brown hair." After a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital, Mia returns to her home town in Minnesota for the summer, where she'll try to summon her inner strength while living within arm's reach of her loving, aging mother.
As the title suggests, Mia's summer in Bonden, Minn., is essentially testosterone-free; her closest male companion may be Soren Kierkegaard.
Mia's distinctly female universe includes a group of gangly and conniving teenage girls, students in a poetry course she's teaching at a local school. She falls in with the "Five Swans," her mother's assisted-living buddies, a sprightly sorority whose most distinctive member is a closeted lesbian with a flair for subversive embroidery. Mia also befriends a young mother with a hot-tempered husband and a lovably kooky 4-year-old daughter with a penchant for wearing a fright wig. As Mia's life gets tangled up in this sisterhood, she begins, slowly, to right herself.
But just as the plot and various subplots -- bullying among the budding poets, death among the Five Swans, a mysterious stalker -- begin to thicken, the book turns chilly and gimmicky. Mia comes out from behind her veil, begins to address the reader directly and jumbles her story: "Chronology is sometimes overrated as a narrative device," she comments. In the latter half of the book, the novel's central question -- Will Mia reconcile with her husband? -- becomes almost inconsequential in the face of larger literary and philosophical inquiries. Many of these observations are worth the interruption: "Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go."
But Hustvedt never quite develops these cerebral concerns or integrates them effectively into the more mundane tale of Mia's evolution. The result is a novel that, for all its promise and ambition, feels neither here nor there.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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