JOIN USSummer Secrets
Jane Green
Pan Macmillan
2016, pp 378, Rs 399
A crucible mix. Heroine Cat learns long after she has grown up that she is a by-blow. The man has now two more daughters.
So Cat goes to Nantucket to meet them all and the rest is Summer Secrets. She is not yet 30, is a journalist (like Green), and a heavy drinker with a positive preference for vodka. How is a daughter of such sober parents such a boozer and so easy with sex? The answer comes when she meets her biological father, Brooks.
With this colourful background that has a pinch of mystery, Green’s pen streams forth easily enough for the reader who is drained out by terrorism and mass-killings. Ah! To live life hedonistically without caring two hoots for this society! “If a girl cannot drink on holiday, what the hell is the world coming to? I drain that glass of vodka in about two seconds, to loud cheering from Aidan, who follows suit, and we both refill, both equally delighted at having found a partner in crime.”
Aidan is the fiancée of Cat’s stepsister Julia, and Green’s crucible is getting the concoction thicker as we flick the pages. Till we come to page 168, that is. The twists and turns get to be properly placed for lifting our eyebrows with indulgence.
So, should we congratulate Jane Green for the concoction? Two pages of acknowledgements, most of them (like her London media gang and Westport gang) for editorial help, make me wonder how much of this writing is by the author. Dare I point out a single paragraph as beautiful and poetic — a lotus in the mud of boozery and debauchery — as Green’s own? Someone from the Acknowledgements might pop up and say, “That is not fair, I did it!”
One cannot blame her either, for the writing profession has been mechanised and macadamised so completely to reach the bestseller list. I learn how such blockbusters (books, films etc) are released in a blaze of freebies for the press: “Every night there was a press launch, or a party, or a premiere, and the whole desk would raid the fashion cupboard across the aisle for fabulous shoes, designer clothes, free samples of make-up, and the whole glittering troop of us would fortify ourselves with a couple of glasses of wine (or four) before piling into a cab, on expenses, and going off to a party.”
The troop consists of eight girls at the Daily Gazette. Eight years in the paper leaves Cat as “the sad single girl, pretending to be happier than any of them, without ties, without commitments.” With so much booze flowing through every page, we cannot avoid AA meetings, can we? So we go to a room in the basement of a church in Paddington. Of course, Cat has no faith “in this God thing”, but then it’s interesting to hear a merchant banker or somebody else give long lists of their misdeeds as an alcoholic, and finally how blessed now they feel — persons proudly announcing 90 days sober, two years sober, nine years sober. But it is not the Higher Power sermonising that works briefly for Cat, but her friendship with Jason.
To please him, she has to remain sober and ah, do the unthinkable. The beer and wine bottles in her fridge get emptied in the sink. So the novel moves on with interesting pages, and we get to know how to write a feature on ankle bracelets and how to pad the story with inputs from the internet. She marries Jason, has Annie, there is a long-drawn-out divorce, and she gets custody of her daughter though she has begun to drink again. But there are pages to go before we end as Green gets other characters on the stage. The past and the present scowl at each other.
Meanwhile, Cat is asked to write about middle-age dating and soon the topic is changed. It should be about people who get divorced but then get back together. What should she write? How? Also, Julia has not given up her desire to hurt Cat for her affair with Aiden. No wonder Green needed all those storytellers in her Acknowledgements to spin like Penelope.
The opening chapter is about the art of trashing accumulated stuff in kitchens: seven sieves, colanders, breadboards, cracked dishes, chipped glasses: a meditative act for the heroine. But then, here is the half bottle of vodka. Should she trash it, or allow it to slip down the throat, smooth as silk? So like this novel. You may trash much in your travel bag but would do well to spare Summer Secrets.