The Summer Without Men: A Novel [Paperback]

Siri Hustvedt (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 26, 2011

"And who among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings or insist that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne should get back together at the end of The Awful Truth? There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren't there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment."

 

Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia’s husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a “pause.” This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia’s release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people’s home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her—her mother and her close friends,“the Five Swans,” and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband—and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own.

From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A theatrically manic poet turns heartbreak into an intellectual endeavor in Hustvedt's intellectually spry latest (after The Sorrows of an American). Fresh out of the hospital at age 55 following a breakdown brought on by her husband's departure for a young colleague referred to as "The Pause," award-winning poet and Columbia professor Mia Fredricksen flees Brooklyn to spend the summer in her Minnesota hometown. There she is in the company of her mother and four other feisty old ladies, the young mother next door, and the seven hormone-addled pubescent girls enrolled in her poetry class at the local arts guild. Mia sorts out her agony as only a scorned woman with a Ph.D. in comparative literature can—by pouring it through a sieve of poets, philosophers, and critical theorists. At times these references eclipse the presence of the narrator herself, but even this absence becomes the basis for philosophical rumination, as Mia corresponds online with the anonymous—and at times abusive—Mr. Nobody. Though initially trapped in a claustrophobic cerebral solitude, Mia opens up, and, in so doing, lets in some much needed air to a constricted narrative, so that instead of being another novel of a woman on the brink, this becomes an adroit take on love, men and women, and girls and women. (May)
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Review

“Exuberant… A lighter, more lilting meditation on men and women, released in perfect time for summer reading… Hustvedt is a fearless writer… The reward for readers comes in the sheer intelligence of her prose… There is terrific writing here, mulling the gifts and limits of art, sex, marriage, but the touch is emphatically light… She’s managed not to shrink the truth of women’s lives, without relinquishing love for men.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Siri Hustvedt’s engaging first novel…is a fragmented meditation on identity, abandonment, and loss. Multiple forms of prose pepper the narrative: poems, letters, e-mails, journal entries, and quotes from a raft of well-known scholars, scientists, and writers … Hustvedt manages to move seamlessly between Blake and Rilke to Kierkegaard and Hegel while maintaining a forward motion to this fluid narrative… Satsifying.” –Boston Globe

“Elegant… a smart and surprisingly amusing meditation on love, friendship and sexual politics.” –The Miami Herald

“An investigation into romantic comedy, both the classic Hollywood version—‘love as verbal war’—and Jane Austen’s Persuasion… Among the novel’s pleasures are its analysis of gender…and the character of Mia herself, who comes across as honest, witty and empathetic.” –The New York Times Book Review

“This brisk, ebullient novel is a potpourri of poems, diary entries, emails and quicksilver self-analysis... The noisy chorus in Mia’s head has an appealing way of getting inside the reader’s too.” –The Wall Street Journal

“A mesmerizing and powerful meditation on marriage, the differences between the sexes, aging and what it means to be a woman…. Truly breathtaking… Rich with both the pleasures and sorrows that make life complete, this is a powerful and provocative novel that will have astute readers reconsidering where exactly the boundaries between truth and fiction lie.” –Bookpage

“Mia Frederickson, the poet narrator of The Summer Without Men… is blessed with empathy, irony and a healthy dose of feminist outrage at the way women’s minds and bodies are routinely devalued… [Hustvedt’s] finely wrought descriptions of everything from love to mean girls to marital sex make [The Summer Without Men] well worth reading.” –Associated Press

“[Hustvedt’s] finely wrought descriptions of everything from love to mean girls to marital sex make [The Summer Without Men] well worth reading.” –Associated Press

“Composed in tight vivid prose, The Summer Without Men is energetic, and handles its subjects with depth and wit, painting its characters and their complex emotions in the kind of detail that rings true to life.” –Bibliokept.org

“Breathtaking… hilarious… What a joy it is to see Hustvedt have such mordant fun in this saucy and scathing novel about men and women, selfishness and generosity…. Hustvedt has created a companionable and mischievous narrator to cherish, a healthy-minded woman of high intellect, blazing humor, and boundless compassion.” –Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“Intellectually spry… An adroit take on love, men and women, and girls and women.” –Publisher’s Weekly

“[A] 21st century riff on the 19th-century Reader-I-married-him school of quiet insurgent women’s fiction… Tart comments on male vs. female styles of writing-and reading-novels are a delight… A smart, sassy reflection on the varieties of female experience.” –Kirkus Reviews 

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 182 pages
• Publisher: Picador (April 26, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312570600
• ISBN-13: 978-0312570606
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #226,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #87 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Women's Fiction > Divorce

More About the Author

Siri Hustvedt is the author of four novels, The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Blindfold, and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, as well as two collections of essays, A Plea for Eros and Mysteries of the Rectangle. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "It's so bitter. Old age." April 3, 2011

By Luan Gaines HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Hustvedt is a witness to the environment she inhabits, painfully turning on the spit of her own intelligence, alternately warmed and charred by a world that either validates or inflicts. After thirty years of marriage, Mia Fredrickson's husband, Boris, wants a break (a "pause": read "other woman"). After a short psychiatric hospitalization (a "pause" of her own), Mia slips into a self-described "yawn between Crazed Winter and Sane Fall", renting a cottage in Minnesota, where her mother is ensconced in independent living quarters with other such elderly travelers on their final journey, a group Mia calls "the Five Swans". Ever practical, Mia commits to an intimate poetry class with seven thirteen-year-old girls, "my informed little broads with their sadistic pleasures, the envy they sweated from their pores and their shocking lack of empathy". There is respite to be found in classroom and ladies' circle, as well as friendship with her neighbors, Lola, four-year-old Flora (sporting a Harpo Marx-like curly wig), and baby Simon. Such distractions are insufficient to contain Mia's misery or stifle nighttime sobs.

On a mission of self-appraisal, Mia is booted from domestic security to the charged rooms of the elderly friends, from Georgiana, 102, to the physically-twisted, yet sharply intelligent Abigail, 94, who stitches hidden pornography into her intricate pieces, an old woman's small rebellion against the conventions of her generation. The Five Swans view Mia as a baby, their wisdom honed of strength, endurance and abiding friendships: "In a place like this, many people aren't touched enough." Drifting between worlds, between lives, Mia is prone to bursts of anger, grief, cathartic verse and a profound appreciation of what it means to be female. Men exist only peripherally in this place- at least temporarily- Mia exploring the uncharted territory of feminine identity and its elastic boundaries, an immeasurable capacity for love and its opposite, rage.

From teenagers juggling with early-onset adolescent angst, the atavistic urges of tribe and the meaning of compassion to a young family struggling with its imperfections and the elderly women who prepare to relinquish all, Mia is the conduit, too intelligent to lie to herself, chronically vigilant and immersed in the wonders of language as a palliative to distress, finely tuned to the intimate moments of daily perception, self-love vs. self-recrimination and the burden of her sex. One never escapes Hustvedt's work unscathed, brutal honesty ameliorated by a magical turn of phrase or poignant insight, like swallowing tiny bits of broken glass, washed down with the clear broth of truth and no hint of bitterness: "We all smell of mortality. Perhaps there is nothing we can do but burst into song." Luan Gaines/2011.

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars The continuum of women March 1, 2011

By Jill I. Shtulman TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Mia Frederickson, an award-winning poet in midlife, tumbles into a temporary madness when her neuroscientist husband Boris surprises her with his request for a marital pause. The pause, of course, "was French with limp but shiny brown hair" and "significant breasts that were real."

So starts this mordant comedy from Siri Hustvedt, a novelist of considerable talent. Mia finds herself eventually caught between a continuum of women -her mother and the other octogenarian widows whom she promptly dubs "the five swans" on one end, and the seven catty adolescent girls who compose her poetry class on the other.

As Mia gingerly and then firmly enters her "summer without men", she strives to emerge from the overbearing shadow of Boris, whose "pause", predictably, is not much more than that. It's a good conceit but somehow, it just doesn't come together.

The consortium of women are difficult to keep straight. The young girls never emerge as individuals (with one exception); the whole really is bigger than the sum of the parts. Ditto for the "five swans", who all seem to be part of one big geriatric "whole." There are some scenes that shine; for example, Abigail, one of the elderly women, reveals embroideries that are actually private amusements, little scenes within scenes. "They don't see it, you know," Abigail stroked a hearing aid cord as she tilted her head. "Most of them. They see only when they expect to see, sugar, not spice, if you comprehend my meaning."

Unfortunately, though, for this reader, those scenes were few, although the good ones are worth their weight in gold. Certainly, I applaud the risks Siri Hustvedt takes in inserting good-and-bad poetry, quirky drawings, literary allusions, scientific findings, even Cary Grant/Irene Dunne screenplay dialogue and epistolary communications. There are some wonderfully perceptive insights into the difficulty of aging and the sameness and difference between the genders, as well as the ways women relate as wives, daughters, mothers, friends and teachers. All of this confirms Ms. Hustvedt's place as a fine writer.

Yet while revelatory and even provocative, the writing seems just a bit too self-conscious as if the author is striving a little too hard. There is not a two-dimensional quality in Mia (an anagram for "I am"), the off-stage Boris, or the other leading characters. there is a distancing quality that never allowed me to embrace Mia or her plight. I was primed to like The Summer Without Men, but in the end, simply could not suspend belief.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars disappointing May 8, 2011

By Dr. Gunta M. Caldwell

Format:Paperback

I love Siri Hustverdt's use of the English language. There is a richness and a depth to her writing style, but unfortunately I found the story without depth and I had great difficulty in finishing it. The cover gave me the impression that there would be a good exploration of the protagonist and where she finds herself on her journey of discovering how best to deal with the dilemma she finds herself in. This really doesn't happen and I found myself wondering when is she going to start digging into her own psyche to see what could be discovered about herself. It seemed superficial with really no insight into herself or the characters around her, that is the young girls she was teaching for the summer. Dr Gunta Krumins-Caldwell author of On Silver Wings