(no subject)

[skygiants]

I 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
- a slow, melancholy book-long breakup
- in large part because Abe cheats on Del with Lioness/Persephone, who OBVIOUSLY decides she wants to bang a sixty-year-old professor in a committed relationship with a woman she likes and respects, because when an elderly professor self-insert exists in the same book as beautiful Persephone then WHAT ELSE COULD POSSIBLY HAPPEN?
- (and then Del revenge-bangs Hades??? I think because Peter Beagle has a sense of fairness and felt that his self-insert should not be the only one to get to bang the divine, and yet the experience has none of the flavor of magical wish-fulfillment like Abe's fling with Persephone because Del remains not a self-insert)
- meanwhile, Del's tragic lesbian daughter Lily spends the whole book in hopeless love with Persephone
- and it does turn out in the end that she is Persephone's best beloved, but definitely not in a gay way, no no
- no, the only person Persephone wants to bang is an elderly professor because that is obviously the natural course of these things
- I really hate professor-midlife-crisis novels

...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?

Comments

[sovay]

- (and then Del revenge-bangs Hades??? I think because Peter Beagle has a sense of fairness and felt that his self-insert should not be the only one to get to bang the divine, and yet the experience has none of the flavor of magical wish-fulfillment like Abe's fling with Persephone because Del remains not a self-insert)

Phooey; that could have been both numinous and hilarious. I recommend watching Cocteau's Orphée (1950) instead.

[edit] Also please enjoy this queer Persephone poem; it's easiest for me to link because I wrote it, but I know for a fact it's not the only one out there.

[skygiants]

Your poem is beautiful! I'd forgotten that you wrote Persephone/Hel, but I'm very glad you did.

It just seems so weird to me in the book that there's all this space to do interesting things with Persephone's choices and Persephone's affections, and then it goes straight for the most infuriatingly predictable choice. Usually Beagle is much less obvious than that.

[sovay]

Your poem is beautiful! I'd forgotten that you wrote Persephone/Hel, but I'm very glad you did.

Thank you!

Usually Beagle is much less obvious than that.

I like the idea of a Persephone who is paired romantically with no one in the end, because she is so classically defined by her relationship with her husband that anyone else she chooses will always be either in contrast to or in accordance with Hades, but I think she should definitely have banged Lily while it was going around! No one needs tragic unrequited lesbianism these days.

[edit] rushthatspeaks and I determined last night that Summerlong really should have been the companion novel to The Folk of the Air, because everything that happens to Abe and Del could have happened to Farrell and Julie Tanikawa, only then it would have been bittersweet and hilarious and profoundly painful but in ways that felt cathartic rather than Philip Roth-lite: for example, Farrell and Julie canonically cannot stay together for any lasting length of time, so the breakup of their romantic partnership (even if they both thought they were past that stage) would have been perfectly in keeping with their entire relationship history and then Julie could have gone off with Hades in a satisfying kaleidoscope-shift of the myth, incidentally freeing Persephone to pair up (or at least have non-tragic lesbian sex) with Lily if she felt like it, because we could totally see Farrell having picked up either an adopted or a biological daughter somewhere along the disorderly way from The Folk of the Air. Leaving Farrell alone at the end, of course, but seriously, dude, you bang one goddess, that happens to a person sometimes, you bang two goddesses, you really should have known what you were getting into the second time.

[sdelmonte]

Oh lord, Beagle is turning into Philip Roth!

Well, we'll always have A Fine and Private Place.

[coyotegoth]

I'll have you know, this made me shriek out loud. (Mind you, that doesn't mean that I dispute it.)

[skygiants]

I have just talked my book club into reading Tamsin next.

[dhampyresa]

I feel like this novel could have been greatly improved by persephone banging Del instead.

[skygiants]

RIGHT?? Honestly I would have been OK with Persephone banging ANYONE BUT ABE.

[sovay]

I feel like this novel could have been greatly improved by persephone banging Del instead.

Hear, hear!

[kore]

Boooo.

I bought a hard copy because I want to support him in the midst of the terrible legal trouble he's going through, but haven't read it yet.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I would probably have bought it if varadia had not lent me her copy, but as it is I'm OK with it not being permanently mine. I'll buy a short story collection I haven't read yet instead.

[kore]

His later short stories have been AMAZING.

[graycardinal]

This puts me in mind of Matt Ruff's Fool On the Hill , which on one hand plays with a number of similar elements, but which differs in that Ruff wrote it while still an undergrad at Cornell (where the novel is in fact set). The writer protagonist is probably still sort of a self-insert, but it works better both because Ruff is writing deliberate comedy much of the time and because there's so much else going on that there's no danger of Marty Stu syndrome.

If you have somehow not read this, I highly recommend it - and in fact pretty much everything Ruff has written.

[ailis_fictive]

Fool On the Hill *blew my teenaged mind* the first time I read it, and it's still high on my list of "most unappreciated books". I've never liked anything of his quite as well since, but they're always worth a read.

[luzula]

This was on my books-to-check-out list but maybe I will take it off now. Also, let me add some more queer Persephone content to this post (Persephone/Eurydice this time).

[opusculasedfera]

...But Beagle already wrote almost exactly this book only it was called "The Folk of the Air" and the age gaps and the angst were smaller so it was much less creepy/tedious. Also it had SCA jokes and comedy sequences to balance out the drama.

Did...did he forget? Did he think he hadn't made his point dramatically enough? Was it no longer wish-fulfillment-y now that he's older than the dude protag in the earlier book?

[amelia_petkova]

I love "The Folk of the Air!" It's been a while since I read so I can't remember some of the character names but we never got any pov from the character who was involved with the goddess (Sia?), right? That probably helped.

I agree with you about the comedic touches--I remember there's a bit at the end when Joe makes some comment about "ducks are going to get your house" to the left-behind mortal lover friend of his because the goddess had left some kind of will saying that her property would be handed over to some kind of bird rescue group if some kind of condition wasn't met.