The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me

By Suzanne Kingsbury (Scribner, 304 pp., $25)

Commenting on the manifold subjects it touches on and the variations in style it employs, one literary critic jokingly referred to This Side of Paradise as “the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” As with Fitzgerald’s 1920 debut, first novels tend to address every theme and subject the author has ever cared about, to relate every interesting encounter the author has ever had, and to do both in the uneven style and with the uncertain pacing of a writer still learning her craft. And so it is with Suzanne Kingsbury’s first novel, The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me.

Set in the fictional town of Houser Banks, Miss., in the summer of 1987, the book is mainly a love story, the coming-of-age tale of Haley Ellyson, a 16-year-old motherless beauty, and Fletcher Greel, the soft-handed prep-school son of the local judge. The star-crossed lovers meet through their mutually star-crossed best friends Riley White, a long-haired white boy who longs to reform the backwoods town he loves, and Crystal Nash, a passionately talented blues singer from the neighboring black community of East Neigh.

In telling the story of these young couples—one separated by class, the other separated by race—Kingsbury also addresses such far-ranging themes as a girl’s need for a mother, a boy’s need for a mother, a girl’s need for a father, a boy’s need for a father, the nihilistic end of all love (if only because of death), the redemptive power of love despite the nearness of loss, the redemptive power of truth despite the temptation of lies, the human need for stability, the human need for restless flight, the nasty ramifications of statutory rape, the joy of tenderness in true love and the illicit pleasure of near-violent sex. Besides the usual set pieces of Southern fiction—scenes in a blues club, scenes from a county fair, scenes at a swimming hole and scenes involving girls riding horses bareback—there are also brief treatises on the evils of capital punishment, the need for prison reform, and the trials of people in wheelchairs, and a bit of black magic thrown in for good measure. The collected works of Suzanne Kingsbury, indeed.

Naturally, taking on so much extraneous material is going to result in some seriously dragging chapters, but the characters are so well drawn that the pacing problems are forgivable because at least they give us more information about the protagonists. No, the other great difficulty of this novel is its unconscious participation in what might be called imaginary settings once removed. Faulkner’s Jefferson, Miss., is a fictional version of the actual Oxford, Miss.; Harper Lee’s Maycomb, Ala., is a fictional version of the actual Monroeville, Ala.; and Carson McCullers’ novel The Member of the Wedding is set in a fictional version of the actual town of Columbus, Ga.; but Kingsbury’s Houser Banks is merely a fictional version of all these fictional towns.

As a novelist, Kingsbury could be forgiven for being a Yankee (she grew up in Connecticut and lives now in Phoenix) if she had only set her “Southern” novel in an actual Southern place or in an actual time in Southern history. Instead, her Houser Banks is a pastiche of clichés that have developed from the rich literary tradition of the American South of the 1930s and ’40s. It’s 1987, but in Houser Banks, white people still use the “n” word, all the women still wear faded cotton dresses, crimes against black people are still thoroughly ignored by the white sheriff, and people who are hot and tired still have no options but to jump into the river to cool off.

There are no swimming pools in this book, no television sets, no stereos and—most amazing of all—no air conditioners. Anyone who’s ever spent an actual summer in the actual South knows very well that the heat here can become a presence as real and affecting as any family member. But, please: In 1987, there would be air-conditioning. It would be cool in the courthouse, in the main-street stores and in the judge’s house, at least, if not pretty much everywhere else. It’s almost maddening to keep reading references to contemporary trends like highlighted hair and string bikinis mixed indiscriminately with elements of an old-South reality long gone by.

Still, for all the things this book gets wrong, what it gets right is so splendid, so rare and so welcome that all previous objections die in a reviewer’s throat. Simply put, Suzanne Kingsbury has nailed the nature of love. And not just first love among teen-agers. She’s convincing on every kind of love the book touches on: The conflicted way Haley loves her father, a rough-mannered laborer but a devoted parent. The desperate way Haley’s father loves Gwyn, the light-footed girlfriend who’ll bear him a child but won’t marry him. The steadfast way the newly widowed judge loved his wife, and the frightened way he loves his only child. The tenacious but unspoken way Fletcher and Riley love each other, each the other’s only true comrade in the world. And, finally, the guilty way Fletcher loves the mother he rarely saw after leaving for boarding school at age 10: “I tell God or whatever it is that looms around up there, if she were here this summer, I would memorize her hair and her eyes and her hands and every word she spoke. I swear I would ask her about every year that passed in her life.”

But as good as Kingsbury is on the myriad ways human beings love each other, where she really shines is in articulating what it feels like to be newly in love. Both of the intertwined love stories in The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me are completely compelling—because of the young characters themselves, who are beautifully delineated, and because of the way Kingsbury describes their feelings. Lots of writers have done reckless teen desire well; Kingsbury’s originality comes in recognizing the moral certainty that arises of real love, even if it’s “only” a love between teen-agers whose desire is being thwarted at every turn. Haley’s father doesn’t trust her safety with any teen-aged boy, and Crystal’s parents rightly recognize the danger Riley’s love puts her in with the outraged rednecks in his extended family, but these pragmatic objections are nothing to either couple. “Fuck those people,” Haley tells her father when he warns her that her friendship with Riley and Crystal is increasingly dangerous. “Fuck all your big-assed men friends think they know right from wrong.”

The looming violence in this book collides, in the end, with the elegiac nature of any story of first love: Kingsbury isn’t sure whether to go out with a bang or a whimper, and what she does manage is an unsatisfactory cross of the two. But in the context of what she does well, this, as with all the other problems of the book, is a minor fault. Edmund Wilson once wrote of Fitzgerald’s first novel, “This Side of Paradise commits every sin except the unpardonable sin; it does not fail to live. The whole preposterous farrago is animated with life.” The same can be said of The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me. Like Fitzgerald before her, Suzanne Kingsbury is on her way.