Prill: The Men of Summer
Jul. 11th, 2011 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteMarion’s a romantic heroine living alone in a kind of Bradbury-esque world of endless summers (the greenhouse tie-in) and sweetly asexual trysts with an endless series of the “boys of summer”—not the baseball players who gave rise to the phrase in Roger Kahn’s book of that name, but rather the kinds of summer “loves” that are placeholders and time-wasters while you wait for The Real Thing to come along.
[spoilers] Marion’s so jaded about the whole serial dating thing that she can carry on the pre-first date conversations in her sleep, and even the initial excitement of a new face and new smile has begun to fade. It’s gotten so bad (she’s dated so many men) that she’s had cards printed up for them with her name and phone number, and gets “a discount when she ordered a box of 500”. She hungers after true romance in an enervated kind of way that leads to solitary reading of “Flair”, host of such trenchant articles as how to conceal skin cancer scars (not really a predicted greenhouse effect) and how to make heat stroke “work” for you, while filling out the banal kinds of quiz you find in these magazines. (Two sisters. “Cosmopolitan”. ‘nuff said.)
At the end of each brief fling, Marion brings her discarded boyfriend du jour to a tent city she refers to as “Camp Marion”, a tent city where her castoffs gather to worship as members of the cult of Marion. She’s so self-absorbed that she thinks their obsession with her is vaguely sweet; their obsession is so great that they don’t even notice her enter their Bible revival-like meeting until, suddenly a bit freaked by all this worships, she yells at them to stop this and move on. But rather than being chastened, they are delighted to see her, shouting out heartfelt poetry and their protestations of love, and she flees, pursued en masse back to her home. When she calls 911 seeking help, the woman on the other end of the line chastises her for forgetting how rare love is, and for being unwilling to nurture it. Marion breaks down, crying, and we realize that the real problem may be that she fears true love more than she desires it. Unwilling to face that possibility, she flees in her car, driving until she’s exhausted. In the town of Bloomer where she finally stops, she meets Rey, a cute and decent-seeming guy, and falls in love with him, inverting her usual pattern thus far—right up to the point where Rey *dumps her* at “Camp Rey”, bringing the story full circle.
Prill’s writing is smooth and fluid, without the sepia tones of Bradbury but with the same sense of longing and more innocent times. He has a nicely and effectively cynical tone in places, such as his invention of Marion’s business cards and his description of the “Flair” articles. There are nice touches that hint at post-greenhouse consequences, such as the stink of the unwashed bodies in unlaundered clothing at her favorite coffee shop, presumably because of water restrictions combined with frequent “greenouts”; cousins to brownouts, greenouts would seem to represent power outages that result from a need for power plants to shut down when they’ve generated their maximum permitted daily allowance of carbon dioxide. And Marion’s fugue-like existence is neatly summarized by my favorite pull quote: “Marion could scarcely remember the last time it rained. It was during Craig...”
This doesn’t strike me as a major tale, despite its clever critique of the shallowness of summer love and how we fool ourselves during our obsessions. But it is skillfully crafted, a pleasant read that moves smoothly through to its denouement and—dare I say it—one that probably makes for perfect light summer beach reading.
[spoilers] Marion’s so jaded about the whole serial dating thing that she can carry on the pre-first date conversations in her sleep, and even the initial excitement of a new face and new smile has begun to fade. It’s gotten so bad (she’s dated so many men) that she’s had cards printed up for them with her name and phone number, and gets “a discount when she ordered a box of 500”. She hungers after true romance in an enervated kind of way that leads to solitary reading of “Flair”, host of such trenchant articles as how to conceal skin cancer scars (not really a predicted greenhouse effect) and how to make heat stroke “work” for you, while filling out the banal kinds of quiz you find in these magazines. (Two sisters. “Cosmopolitan”. ‘nuff said.)
At the end of each brief fling, Marion brings her discarded boyfriend du jour to a tent city she refers to as “Camp Marion”, a tent city where her castoffs gather to worship as members of the cult of Marion. She’s so self-absorbed that she thinks their obsession with her is vaguely sweet; their obsession is so great that they don’t even notice her enter their Bible revival-like meeting until, suddenly a bit freaked by all this worships, she yells at them to stop this and move on. But rather than being chastened, they are delighted to see her, shouting out heartfelt poetry and their protestations of love, and she flees, pursued en masse back to her home. When she calls 911 seeking help, the woman on the other end of the line chastises her for forgetting how rare love is, and for being unwilling to nurture it. Marion breaks down, crying, and we realize that the real problem may be that she fears true love more than she desires it. Unwilling to face that possibility, she flees in her car, driving until she’s exhausted. In the town of Bloomer where she finally stops, she meets Rey, a cute and decent-seeming guy, and falls in love with him, inverting her usual pattern thus far—right up to the point where Rey *dumps her* at “Camp Rey”, bringing the story full circle.
Prill’s writing is smooth and fluid, without the sepia tones of Bradbury but with the same sense of longing and more innocent times. He has a nicely and effectively cynical tone in places, such as his invention of Marion’s business cards and his description of the “Flair” articles. There are nice touches that hint at post-greenhouse consequences, such as the stink of the unwashed bodies in unlaundered clothing at her favorite coffee shop, presumably because of water restrictions combined with frequent “greenouts”; cousins to brownouts, greenouts would seem to represent power outages that result from a need for power plants to shut down when they’ve generated their maximum permitted daily allowance of carbon dioxide. And Marion’s fugue-like existence is neatly summarized by my favorite pull quote: “Marion could scarcely remember the last time it rained. It was during Craig...”
This doesn’t strike me as a major tale, despite its clever critique of the shallowness of summer love and how we fool ourselves during our obsessions. But it is skillfully crafted, a pleasant read that moves smoothly through to its denouement and—dare I say it—one that probably makes for perfect light summer beach reading.