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Dec. 30th, 2016 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI 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?
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?
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Date: 2016-12-31 05:29 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2016-12-31 05:33 am (UTC)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.
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