July 15-21, 2004

art

Maine Event

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY: "Everybody's main event — their central business — takes place in the past," says erstwhile Philadelphia author Justin Cronin on his new novel The Summer Guest.

Justin Cronin time-travels his way through a slow-cooked story of love, loss and fishing.

by John Freeman

Everyone knows not to mess with Texas. What's less known is how territorial folks from Maine can be. Just two weeks after publishing The Summer Guest (Dial Press, 369 pp., $24), a novel set on a Down East summer camp, Justin Cronin is beginning to find out. "To my great delight," says the 41-year-old writer and onetime Philadelphian, "I get e-mail from people saying, "Is this such-and-such a place?' And they're wrong. I really tried to smear my tracks. If I didn't, I'd have people calling my house saying, "Hey the fire station isn't near the post office!"

In this day and age of postmodern fiction, Cronin is something of a throwback — an Edward Hopper-like realist who specializes in stories that feel like they could be set in your hometown. His first book, Mary and O'Neil, followed a couple from birth to middle-age. The Summer Guest is an equally wholesome story with a sad edge. Harry Wainwright is dying of cancer and for his last wish he travels to the Maine camp he's visited for the past 30 summers to catch one last fish.

Cronin got the idea for the story during a vacation he took on a lake in the northwest corner of Maine — a place so untouched he won't tell me where exactly it is. "I saw this man, sitting alone. He was an older guy, obviously in really poor health — using oxygen. Eventually his family came into the dining hall — a grown son in his 40s, a woman between the man's and his son's age, and then a little girl. They came in and kept talking to the guy; he wanted to know everything, every detail. I realized he was too sick to go himself and the story they were telling him of their morning was the closest he would come to getting on that lake. It was very sad and it was a beautiful sight. Our waitress came over and I asked about him — and she immediately burst into tears. "It's terribly sad,' she said, "he's so sick and he's been coming here 30 years.'"

Cronin sat on the idea for almost 10 years while he completed Mary and O'Neil. Finally, he wrote a novella from the perspective of Jordan, the guide who is charged with taking Harry out to catch that last fish. The story had legs of its own but Cronin knew he had to add more. "Boy, am I great at 72 pages," he jokes. "But in the publishing world that's a particularly bad thing — it would have helped if I was a 19th-century German."

After winning the PEN/Hemingway Award and a prestigious Whiting Writers' Award, Cronin finally had the time to cut down his teaching load at La Salle University and to go back to the story and flesh it out. He added several more characters whose lives crisscross and form a pretzel of sexual and emotional intrigue. There's Joe, who owns the camp and runs it with his wife, Lucy — who Harry once took a shine to. There's Kat, Joe and Lucy's daughter — who Jordan has his eye on. And there's Hal, Harry's son, who is married to a high-powered lawyer but spends most of his time trying to control his ailing father. "The love of everybody's life is the wrong person," says Cronin.

The Summer Guest is narrated round-robin style, so each character says their piece and unloads their secrets in due course. It's a particularly moving strategy, and an impressive one, too. Cronin alternates between the perspectives of a 70-year-old cancer patient and a 46-year-old woman with utter seamlessness. When asked how he accomplished this Ouija board feat of conjuring, Cronin downplays it. "When people asked me on tour for the last book, "How do you know what it's like to miss your college-age son?' At the time my daughter was 3 or 4, but the answer was, "Hey, listen, my daughter's leaving home in 14 years and I miss her already.'"

Cronin's work as a novelist, then, is often akin to time travel. These days Cronin lives in Houston, Texas, and often wishes he could travel, period. For now, he'll have to keep doing that in his fiction. "I once interviewed Frederick Busch," Cronin says, "and I asked him how he knew when something was a novel and not a short story and he said the most beautiful thing. He said, "when I feel like time is going to pore through my characters.' So I wrote The Summer Guest, which is set in 36 hours in 1994, but takes 50 years to explain what the hell happened. Everybody's main event — their central business — takes place in the past. Again that's just people, that's just the way that the novel resembles human life while tidying it up."

Justin Cronin reads and signs The Summer Guest on Mon., June 19, 6 p.m., Borders, 1 S. Broad St., 215-568-7400.