cover image The Summer Before the Summer of Love: Stories

The Summer Before the Summer of Love: Stories

Marly A. Swick. HarperCollins Publishers, $21 (209pp) ISBN 978-0-06-017254-1

The characters in this second story collection from the author of A Hole in the Language (which won the 1990 Iowa Short Fiction Award and has since been retitled Monogamy) live in a familiar modern American landscape where suburban adultery, alienated youth, betrayal, divorce and untimely death abound. Swick's language, particularly her dialogue, resounds with the joy, suffering or confusion felt by her characters. In ``The Shadow of the Cross,'' Evan is on vacation with his wife, Molly, but is falling in love with her unmarried friend Delia, who has come along on the trip to Taos, N.M. Losing Molly means losing his daughters, but after he and Delia view a local ``mystery'' painting of Christ, Evan finds himself hoping that a sign of his new love will emerge in Molly's photograph of him and Delia in the same way that a cross miraculously appeared over Christ's shoulder as they looked at the painting in total darkness. In ``The Ghost Mother,'' a savvy pair of married L.A. screenwriters who are unable to have a child take in a pregnant teenager, found through a baby broker, whose baby they will adopt. Like a ghostwriter, the girl has been brought in to ``author'' the baby the wife cannot have. But the wife, unable to generate any maternal feelings toward this 16-year-old child, wonders how she will respond when the baby is born and becomes, suddenly, her own. In ``The Prodigal Father,'' middle-aged Marshall hangs around his college-age daughter's house after his own burns down in the Oakland fires. Tripping on LSD with one of her housemates, he mourns not only the loss of his house and belongings but also of his long-gone marriage, his dog, his old life. But, ultimately, he--like other figures in this rewarding collection--arrives at quiet insights that prove both satisfying and resonant. (Sept.)