The Summer without Men

Siri Hustvedt makes me feel accompanied. I've had a deeply rewarding, interesting and educational Sunday, allowing myself to let this one person and her story be my guests. I've not gone anywhere. Now the book is closed and I am alone. Surprise! ( )

Polymathic chicklit with a PhD: something I'd been hoping to find for ten years. Some time ago I had concluded it just didn't get published as there wasn't enough of an audience.

I'd never read Siri Hustvedt before, assuming that her books were yet more run-of-the-mill English-language literary fiction. (The rest of her work does still sound that way to me, TBH.) But a few weeks ago I idly clicked on Amazon reviews for this book, and among the more negative ones, it was criticised by chicklit readers for being too pretentious, and by literary readers for being too superficial. And also, how was it a Summer Without Men if she quoted male writers and philosophers all the time?

This tale of Mia, an academic and poet on a break from her marriage sounded very promising.

We have such chicklit cliches such as a younger, French Other Woman; going back to a former home-town after a relationship breakup; one-sided ranting about the failings of the errant man; a group of schoolgirls who remind the protagonist of her younger days; a book group of elderly ladies reading Jane Austen; characters who - whilst not noted for their wealth - never worry about money.

Alongside such things, standard chicklit often has bright characters who are denoted by brief references to their study or work and the use of a couple of longer words in conversation - but if you'd like to know more about that side of them, you're inevitably disappointed.
Not here. Reflections on the ideas of philosophers and poets (and not just the best-known ones) form substantial parts of Mia's thoughts; we have a page-long ponder of affective neuroscience; an obscure set of Goya prints form an apt backdrop to a scene involving bitchy preteens; punning references to the linguistic turn; and the ridiculously hip occurrence of some subversive vintage embroidery... I could go on. I like it when a book gives me a few things I don't know, to look up, but not so many that this interrupts the flow of the story, and this was perfect on that count.

Mia feels very deeply and thinks & knows very deeply too. If she were a real person I would want to be friends with her.

I only had two disappointments with this book.
One: it doesn't have chapters.

Two: the lack of references to psychology other than Freud, and that Mia didn't seek to tie up some of the neuroscience musings with her own experiences of a brief breakdown and recovery, or the past aspects of her relationship. Some attachment theory, for instance, would have worked perfectly. I recall a couple of other reviewers saying there was too much self-analysis in this book; I would have liked more, if the narrator accompanied it with reference and theory, as she does so well in some other subject areas.



I loved this book, but I hesitate to give it five stars - at least on here - to stand in my list alongside the likes of Kavalier and Clay and Middlemarch; yet its moments of glaring cliche, alongside its erudition, are what made it work so very well for me as comfort reading. ( )

I thought the level of observation in this piece of writing was wonderful in so many ways, however it fails as a novel in my view. I was really struggling not to skip huge swathes of the second half. It also took me from July until September to plow through, with detours for other novels - always a bad sign.

Still, I will look forward to her next one because, after all, she is Siri. ( )

The story was a bit cliched, but not too bad. I didn't have any expectations going into this and since it was a quick read, my reaction's rather mild. I didn't hate or like it with a passion. ( )

The summer without men is not strictly man free - but the book sets women firmly in the foreground. A married poet, Mia, recovering from a breakdown triggered by her husband leaving her for another woman, finds herself back in the small town she came from for the summer. Hustvedt explores the different ages of woman, from the young girls discovering how to be cruel to the old ladies dying off one by one, from the new mother in an ambiguously abusive marriage to Mia herself, thirty years into marriage and twenty some years into motherhood. Mia's authorial voice is engaging and challenging, playing with time and narrative. This is a deceptively light and easy read, which engages and comes to terms with the great mysteries of iife and death - no small or unambitious task