The Summer without Men

I really like Hustvedts's writing. It's always smart and emotional and just on the right side of being pretentious. She's smart in that she picks intelligent, worldy, artistic characters as her voice so that her novels are believable.

In this short novel, 50-something year old Mia has been left by her husband, had a mental breakdown, and gone to visit her mother for the summer. During this summer, she is surrounded by women. She is a poet and author and teaches a summer course on poetry to a group of seven drama-filled young teenage girls. She also gets to know her mother's aging circle of friends in her nursing home. Setting up the contrasts and similarities between these two groups gives the book structure and depth. And then she also show more meets a neighbor who is a young mother in an abusive marriage.

This is not my favorite Siri Hustvedt novel (that remains The Blazing World), but it's a good and accessible intro to her writing. show less

[The Summer without Men] is by far the best book I've read this summer. It's a small volume but packed with ideas. Mia Frederickson, the poet narrator, is recovering from a breakdown after Boris, her husband of thirty years, asks for a "pause." An old story but Hustvedt makes is fresh.

It really is a summer without men; Mia returns to her hometown in Minnesota to visit her aging mother. She agrees to teach a poetry class to seven pubescent girls. Her neighbors are a young couple with two small children. The couple yells a lot. As Mia moves from adolescents to octogenarians, she contemplates the roles of women at different ages and stages.

When she's alone, she does a fair amount of ruminating that involves women in literature, as well as show more how philosophers and scientists treat women. And as if this weren't enough, Hustvedt also plays with the narrative. At points, Mia informs us that many things are going on simultaneously, but words are sequential, so we have to wait to find out what happens.

I just finished it and can't wait to read it again. show less

An unusual work, and difficult to review. The protagonist is a 50-something poet who has been left by her husband of 30 years, and has a psychotic break. The novel picks up as she is recovering, and has gone back to her old hometown to spend the summer and get back together. The work trails through art, literature, poetry, and biology, with a lot of feminism to focus the work. The characters are strangely, oddly disengaged. The protagonist, even when subject to crying bouts, seems to be detached from the world she inhabits, moving through it as a ghost or spectator that occasionally finds herself drawn into the strange, all too real world of the natives. Between the teenage girls and their catty meanness, and the old ladies with their show more gracious charm, and a young neighbor couple with a rocky marriage, she richochets without direction or meaning, mostly trying to keep up. The work will bring back difficult memories for many middle-aged women who have experienced some of the same emotions, and corporeal situations, described in this work. The ending is not unexpected, but not known far in advance, either, and it resists the urge to clean up the messy, chaotic world the narrator inhabits. Disturbing, familiar, and a strong look at the rich world inhabited by middle-aged women (something sadly lacking in most literature). show less

Hustvedt brings together a kind of 21st century Mrs Herzog with the old "maiden, mother and crone" canard to take an ironic look at some of the ways gender identities still define the lives of middle-class middle-American women, and at the creative ways in which women sometimes manage to subvert those definitions. It's a very clever novel, full of interesting ideas and more-or-less buried literary allusions (not to mention poems, parodies of poems, emails, and Stevie-Smith-style pen-drawings), but it's doesn't come over as a philosophical mind-stretcher like the other two of her novels I've read: more like very superior chick-lit (for literature graduates and above). If Mrs Gaskell were still around and living in the Midwest instead of show more Cheshire, this is what she might have written instead of Cranford... show less

It was with a certain sense of irony that I alighted on Siri Hustvedt’s novel. Acerbic, witty and intellectual, it tells the story of an emotionally tumultuous summer in the life of the poet Mia Fredricksen. Married for thirty years, she is blindsided when her husband Boris announces that he wants a ‘pause’, a euphemism that Mia can decipher only too well: ‘The Pause was French … She had significant breasts that were real, not manufactured, narrow rectangular glasses and an excellent mind.‘ Distraught and incandescent, Mia heads back to her childhood home – the town of Bonden in Minnesota – where she grieves, regroups and contemplates that eternally mysterious disconnect between the sexes. But, while her rift with Boris show more frames the novel, Mia’s time in Bonden gives her a fresh perspective on life, focused on the multifarious nature of female friendship...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2018/07/01/the-summer-without-men-siri-hustvedt/ show less

Poet Mia Fredricksen's husband asks for a "pause" in their thirty year marriage so he can have a fling with a French neuroscientist in his laboratory. Her reaction is to go quite mad, requiring a brief stint in a mental hospital and medication. When Mia gets out, she goes to stay near her mother, and takes a class teaching poetry to teenaged girls. Thus starts her summer without men: she makes friends with her mother's elderly friends (who she calls "the Swans"); she befriends the young woman who lives next door with two small children (the joyous Flora and the baby Simon); and she shepherds her young teenaged charges through the pitfalls of poetry and puberty.

In between, she attempts a journal about her sexual encounters, she fends off show more emails from "Mr Nobody", she gets regular updates from her daughter Daisy about her husband, she discovers the beautiful embroidered art that one of the Swans produces (and, oh, how I wanted one of those pieces!), she reads poetry, she contemplates philosophy, and she rants about neuroscience.

This is an amazingly wide-ranging work, in a remarkably fresh, entertaining and truly funny voice. Every character is wonderfully delineated (okay, some of the teenaged girls were hard to distinguish, but I think that's true in real life, now I'm well past that age myself), and even though there is heartbreak in here (Mia's madness and the people she meets in the hospital are rather terrifying; the elderly Swans are reduced in number by the end; and Mia also recalls the suicide of her brother-in-law some years prior) it never comes across as depressing.

Mia's voice is a bit all over the shop, which I feel is quite intentional, although it did take a while to get used to. At times she's mucking around, writing bits in different voices for the sheer fun of it all; at other times one worries that her madness is returning, or was never far from the surface to start off with.

I would have liked more plot, because I do like plot most of all in my books. But the plot (when it appears for brief moments) is fascinating and it's probably made me think more than any other book yet this year, forcing me out of my comfort zone and into contemplating growing old, madness, and reading poetry and philosophy and neuroscience.

And it's all (almost) without men. ;) show less

Predictably, given Hustvedt's stature in the literary community, this novel has garnered extremely favourable reviews. Unfortunately, the novel itself does not live up to the hyperbole. The work of some authors you just really want to like. For me, Hustvedt is one of these. She can write well, she occasionally takes 'risks' (or what seem like them), and she is erudite and self-effacing in person (ok, i heard her read and talk once, and i was swooning).
The narrator of this novel, Mia Frederickson, is an award-winning poet and successful academic who 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" show more and "significant breasts that were real."
The novel starts well with an emotionally raw writing style – laced with a bitter humour – that seemingly holds no punches. The immediacy of the writing directly engages the reader but somehow it just doesn't hold together and my attention pretty quickly began to wander and interest wane. To recover from her psychological meltdown, the narrator decamps to the country to live near her mother and take a poetry class for adolescent girls. And so begins her 'summer without men'. The novel is peopled with a variety of girls and women who all rather obviously represent various aspects of contemporary female experience. Yet increasingly, the characters she encounters and what we learn about their lives seems increasingly contrived and artificial. There are some great scenes and moments of writing – particularly when dealing with women and ageing – but they are not enough to sustain the novel.
For me the biggest problem of this novel was that the privileged life of the narrator remains unexamined and unacknowledged. The choices available to her as a white, middle-class, successfully employed professional are just not available to the majority of women who find themselves in Mia's predicament. Hustvedt has chosen to write this novel in first person which, while imbuing the novel with immediacy, also limits the reader's access to other points of view. If the book had been either written in third person, or if other characters' perspectives had been included (Boris, the errant husband could have been interesting or his new girlfriend etc), then there is a potential for drawing attention to unreliability of all first-person narrations and perhaps working to undercut the 'precious' tone of the book.
Instead, we are submitted to Mia's endless digressions about her life, her marriage, her opinions which increasingly distanced me as a reader. Hustvedt just tries too hard, and many of the scenes become almost 'set pieces' to illustrate some other aspect of contemporary womanhood. The most engaging character in the novel for me is the four year old daughter of her new neighbour Lola. The writing describing her interactions with both the child (and often, her mother) were invariably warm and fresh, with none of the self-conscious archness that marred other scenes.
While ultimately i was disappointed with the novel i did enjoy Hustvedt's playing with form and her use of a variety of writing styles: incorporating poetry (sometimes bad), drawings, emails etc. But did this make me 'care' about the narrator and her travails? Unfortunately, not a jot. show less