The Summer House

I was visiting with Hopkins a couple of weeks ago when she asked me what I was reading at the moment (part of our typical conversational pattern). The embarrassment of having to say I haven't read anything for ages was just the shame that I needed to finally get me to read what I've been trying to get into for probably a year, The Summer House.

At dinner after Fr. Schall's final lecture at Georgetown, Dr. DW strongly recommended an obscure British novelist who is a conservative Catholic, who writes strong women characters and deals with disability--Alice Thomas Ellis--the pen name for Anna Haycraft (if I chose a pen name, I would try to make it sound better than Alice Thomas Ellis). He said that she is witty and interesting. All things I particularly love in a novelist.

The Summer House is a trilogy--three novellas with three different main characters gradually circling to the center of the story. The first tells the story of Margaret, drawing the reader, even through the cloudy descriptions, into her depression and its resulting passivity. We learn the story of Margaret's visit to Egypt, her interest in a group of nuns there, and her passionate love and associated evil. In the present day, she is pushed toward a bad marriage. The second story is from the perspective of her mother-in-law-to-be. From Margaret's perspective, she's a boring old lady. Mrs. Munro's own explanation of her life is far more interesting. Margaret's and Mrs. Munro's narratives are united in their attraction toward the central character in the third story, Lili. Lili sleeps with almost all the men around, driven by insecurity in her relationship to her own husband. She likens herself to Lilith, Adam's mythological first wife, who is replaced with Eve. The end of each novella is the same--a sacrificial and selfish set-up to get Margaret out of her impending marriage.

The Catholicism in the book is by no means overpowering--Margaret is attracted to some Egyptian nuns. All the women telling their story mention, at one point or another, going to confession. That's about it, at least explicitly.

One thing about the trilogy is curious--the narration is in the first person, told by Margaret, Mrs. Munro, and then Lili; however, sometimes the narrator tells the reader even about her own limits. This is to say, the narrator both is and is not the character. The narrator always lets on a bit more about herself than a person is able to articulate. The narrator is both the character and the author. In this way, the author is able to both get inside the disability (depression, in Margaret's case; aging and a bit of dementia, in Mrs. Munro's) and to transcend it.

The trilogy explores fate and free will: Margaret is being pushed around by her mother and by other circumstances and people that happen to her, and quite possibly, the book implies, by God (who works through the actions and motivations of the other characters in the book). It explores motivations for action and inaction. And it does so in a way that is slow and intentional and gradual, retelling the events of the story multiple times through different perspectives that each reveal something new. This method of story telling shows the limits that exist on our self-knowledge and on our knowledge of others.