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Dec. 30th, 2016 02:09 pmI really wanted to love Peter Beagle's newest novel Summerlong, because I love Peter Beagle and I never thought we would get a new Beagle novel, but alas I did not like it so well as I wished.
Summerlong follows long-term stable romantic partners Abe Aronson, a cranky Jewish retired professor that it's difficult not to read as Beagle's self-insert, and Joanna Delvecchio, a flight attendant counting down the years until she can retire and do what she wants.
Their relatively settled patterns are disrupted by the entrance of Lioness, a Mysterious Beautiful Young Woman who is Vaguely Greek And Somehow Unworldly, Strongly Identified With Spring, Makes Flowers Bloom, and appears to be Fleeing Or Hiding From Someone, Maybe, IDK, A Divine Greek Husband...?
Basically this appears to be Peter Beagle's stab at a divine-mundane novel in the vein of DWJ's Eight Days of Luke, in which a brush with myth triggers a change in the lives of the humans caught up in it. This is all well and good as far as it goes, and certainly Peter Beagle has the chops for the numinous mundane, except that the mundane part interwoven with the myth has all the features of those professor-midlife-crisis novels that have long been my nemesis, featuring ( irritated spoilers )
...however, the whole thing was almost worth it for how hard I laughed during one particular sequence in which Abe reads the entire Lymond Chronicles while repeatedly flying back and forth between Chicago and Seattle. This is as far as I remember the only other fiction namechecked in the entire book. Why the Lymond Chronicles, Peter Beagle? Did you just now read them and decide you had to tell the world?
Summerlong follows long-term stable romantic partners Abe Aronson, a cranky Jewish retired professor that it's difficult not to read as Beagle's self-insert, and Joanna Delvecchio, a flight attendant counting down the years until she can retire and do what she wants.
Their relatively settled patterns are disrupted by the entrance of Lioness, a Mysterious Beautiful Young Woman who is Vaguely Greek And Somehow Unworldly, Strongly Identified With Spring, Makes Flowers Bloom, and appears to be Fleeing Or Hiding From Someone, Maybe, IDK, A Divine Greek Husband...?
Basically this appears to be Peter Beagle's stab at a divine-mundane novel in the vein of DWJ's Eight Days of Luke, in which a brush with myth triggers a change in the lives of the humans caught up in it. This is all well and good as far as it goes, and certainly Peter Beagle has the chops for the numinous mundane, except that the mundane part interwoven with the myth has all the features of those professor-midlife-crisis novels that have long been my nemesis, featuring ( irritated spoilers )
...however, the whole thing was almost worth it for how hard I laughed during one particular sequence in which Abe reads the entire Lymond Chronicles while repeatedly flying back and forth between Chicago and Seattle. This is as far as I remember the only other fiction namechecked in the entire book. Why the Lymond Chronicles, Peter Beagle? Did you just now read them and decide you had to tell the world?
