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Summer's House: A Novel [Hardcover]

Eric Gabriel Lehman (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)


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Book Description

June 9, 2000
One hot New York City summer in the 1970s, the lives of three very different people - each uncomfortable with their surrounds and struggling to find a place where they can feel a sense of belonging - are forever changed.

Raymond, an overly cerebral 17 year old, lives in the Bronx with his increasingly estranged parents. He's decided that the time has come for him to fall in love even if he is soure why or with which gender and grapples with the conflicting directions in which he is pulled by his desires and fears. As his parents become increasingly estranged, his mother leaves for a trip to Israel leaving Raymond and his father housemates in an apartment in which neither feels at home.

Jerome, one of the legion of unrecognized poets marginally employed as a delivery man Seven Wonders Gourmet Foods, cannot rid himself of his obsession for the woman he loved and lived with - until she threw him out when he uncovered her secret past. His mentor - and sole friend - is the aging, erudite Maurice Rose, who - like Jerome - is about to thrown out of his home.

Lester, Raymond's maternal uncle, is the middle aged owner of Seven Wonders Gourmet Foods and an unsuccessful suburbanite living on the edges of New York City. In a family and area were success and status are everything, he must confront the miseries of his failing business, a tense home life, and a persistent obscene caller who knows a bit too much about his wife.

Drawn together by chance, circumstance, and mysterious woman with a secret in her past, their lives' intersect, collide, pull apart, and irreversibly change.

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Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

Three men scarred by family and failure find their lives unexpectedly intersecting as they survive a Manhattan summer: a time in the 1970s that's more a steamy dreamscape inhabited by the lost, lonely, and confused than a crisp-edged slice of reality.Lehman's (Quaspeck, 1993, etc.) three narrators relate their experiences of the summer that will become a defining moment in their lives. Raymond, the youngest, uncertain of his sexual identity, longs to fall in love. He begins his story shortly before graduating from high school, when his parents have just separated: his father was having an affair, and, never close to his father, Raymond blames him rather than his quirky, self-absorbed mother. Then there's 25-year-old Jerome, a poet, who was hospitalized by his sister and brother-in law for deliberately setting a fire in their house. At the institution he meets Agatha, an elusive, disturbed young woman with whom he later lives--until she throws him out upon learning that he's been keeping a record of her secrets. Last comes middle-aged former boy wonder Lester, Raymond's uncle and Jerome's current employer. Lester's business is failing, his son Stevie is mentally retarded, and his wife is having their yard expensively landscaped. As Raymond draws closer to his father after his mother goes to Israel, he meets Agatha, reads Jerome's journals (which she's kept), and falls for an older gay man. Jerome, meanwhile, moves in with performance artist Dwight, who has enlisted the homeless to build a tower of trash in the empty building where they're living illegally. Lester, who treats Jerome as his confidante, declares bankruptcy, but--as Dwight's planned spectacle, complete with poetry readings and music by friends of Raymond's, goes tragically awry--the lives of all converge in surprising and redemptive ways.A richly detailed, if sometimes too busy, tale of what can happen when the thermometer rises and action intensifies. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Eric Gabriel Lehman is the author of two previous critically acclaimed novels - Waterboys and Quaspeck - and his stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies He is the winner the National Arts Club Award and the New Letters Literary Award for fiction. Born in New York, where he currently lives, he teaches at City College of New York.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (June 9, 2000)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0312241127
  • ISBN-13: 978-0312241124
  • Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 1.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,578,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Average Customer Review
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A rich, rewarding story, August 20, 2000
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This review is from: Summer's House: A Novel (Hardcover)
There are few novels that capture the breadth of New York City in the late 70s quite like this one - from the anarchic artists and squatters in Soho to the blue-collar neighborhoods of the Bronx. And I can think of few novels that are able to encompass and express the inner lives of such a diverse group of people. There's an exquisite ability at work here that manages to give voice to the unspoken dynamics of family life. As I read this book I felt like these were people I knew, people I grew up with. And for all the reality of the people, there's a poetry to the writing that managed to lift these daily, desperate lives to the heroic - and the tragicomic. Narrated by three different voices, three characters in the novel, (four if you count entries in a stolen journal that's essential to the plot) the reader has a fully three dimensional view of all the characters. But this view progresses in stages, so that it has all the mystery and beauty of a deepening relationship. Sometimes you learn things you don't like, but you're hooked. These people pull you into their story of love sought and confused sexuality, of social climbing and marital infidelity. This is a rich reading experience I would recommend to anyone who looks both depth of feeling and a good story.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Moving and rewarding, June 18, 2000
This review is from: Summer's House: A Novel (Hardcover)
Summer's House is a wonderful novel that engages the reader from the first mysterious page. The three leading characters are all intriguing and complex people that you care about and understand. The language is poetic and evocative, with many monents that stop you in your tracks to let the richness and vividness sink in. There are several mysteries that unfold throughout the book and the clues are woven into a plot that pulls you along. The intensity of the character's plights at times becomes almost palpable through the writer's style and pacing. All through the novel there is a thread of sexuality which is tenderly and convincingly portrayed-whether it is a young man's stumbling forays into the world of adult sex or the sad attempt of an older man to find love and redemption in an affair. If you like multli-generational family stories (with a Jewish backdrop) movingly told, with beautiful prose, you'll love Summer's House.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
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First Sentence:
Mother played with dolls. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Uncle Alfred, Uncle Lester, New Cornwall, Aunt Rhoda, Maurice Rose, New York, Aunt Malvina, Lester Loewenthal, Feelie's Wheel, Aunt Mattie, Lazar Loewenthal, New Jersey, Seven Wonders, Central Park, Eddie Erhart, First Avenue, Parks Department, Puerto Rican, Roger Henderson, Moe Fleischer, Old Spice, Radio Shack, Coney Island, Mail Boy, Second Avenue
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