In Summer Light, Zibby Oneal’s 1985 book about a seventeen-year-old girl’s season of self-discovery, is one of the last young adult novels that I read as a young adult.
In it, Kate Brewer, daughter of renowned painter Marcus, has been recovering from mononucleosis and writing a paper on The Tempest. Kate has a fractious relationship with her father because she sees the way the household is ordered around Marcus’s moods and because of how he treats the work of the women who surround him—his wife, his daughters.
Marcus is the kind of man who says things at dinner like, “Painting is like making love.”
He’s your basic old white man artist nightmare, and Kate is now mature enough to dislike the way he dismisses Kate’s mother, Floss—herself a former painter who now devotes herself to her garden and her husband’s moods. Marcus says of one of Floss’s canvasses:
“There were artists all over New York doing that those years. In fact, when I met Floss she was doing one. Remember that big thing, Floss? What did you call it? ‘Coney Island’?”
Kate’s mother paused, serving a spoonful of peas. “‘Jones Beach,’” she said.
“Oh, right. Well, I knew it had the name of some swimming place.”
In a few casually brutal sentences, Marcus dismisses the only painting that Floss has ever seen fit to keep.
Kate herself has tried to paint and encountered a similar reaction from her father, resulting in her giving up her artistic ambitions. But when graduate student Ian Jackson arrives to catalog Marcus’s paintings for a retrospective, Kate begins to reconsider how her choices are dictated by her father, and decides to explore where her talents lie.
At another point in the book, Oneal notes:
It was the sort of conversation that she and her mother sometimes had, not so much for the sake of what they said, but because their voices moving back and forth were a kind of touching.
Marcus is the kind of man who says things at dinner like, “Painting is like making love.” He’s your basic old white man artist nightmare.
In Summer Light is beautifully written. Sections from this book might seem at home in the pages of TheNew Yorker. Indeed, with its spare, evocative prose and the restrained feelings of its characters, In Summer Light is also for me associated with a certain kind of story about privileged white people. This level of spareness and restraint can only happen in the absence of having to explain the world in which the book takes place. The implication is that if the reader doesn’t understand the nuances and modulations, she should learn.
This is a setting in which the loudest noises come from the clink of wine glasses above the strained silence of a dinner party. The two “lower class” characters—housekeeper Mrs. Hilmer and her daughter Frances—are treated with disdain by Kate because they ask openly for what they want—they are too direct.
In the same way, the reader of In Summer Light is schooled to value what is unsaid and read between lines—sometimes, the relationship of text to reader is like the way Kate and her mother communicate, “not so much for the sake of what [is] said, but … voices moving back and forth.”
Indeed, with its spare, evocative prose and the restrained feelings of its characters, In Summer Light is also for me associated with a certain kind of story about privileged white people.
The reader builds meaning into the silence. She works to keep up with the prose—not the other way around.
This is not to say that I dislike In Summer Light. I loved it as a fifteen (or sixteen) year old, knowing that I didn’t understand all the currents and nuances swirling in its pages. I wanted to master this way of looking at and being in the world. And part of the answer, for me, was to stop borrowing books that were supposedly aimed at me.
On rereading, I still love In Summer Light because it is so insightful about the practical and emotional work that women do, because it captures so well that feeling of straining toward adulthood, of learning one’s worth and power. And yes, I love it now because it has kind of beautiful writing that I trained to appreciate after first having read it. But of course, part of that training is learning to look down on what In Summer Light is—a novel for teens, a book written by a woman for young women.
I’m going in circles, aren’t I?
At least, that’s how I’ve felt trying to write this. But this is what I got from all of my reading and fancy degrees: that there are hierarchies. That epic poetry—by Homer, by Virgil—is more important than lyric poetry—Sappho. That literary fiction is better than genre fiction. That the genres most looked down on are mostly written for and about women and girls—romance and young adult fiction. And here is Oneal, who has written a book about young women and their work in a style that can be approved by men, in a genre that is not.
What I’m trying to say—what In Summer Light shows—is that a lot of the work of women is quiet or dismissed. And that women’s artistic output ends up being hushed or lost, too. It’s almost, almost as that work doesn’t exist:
“There were artists all over New York doing that those years. In fact, when I met Floss she was doing one. Remember that big thing, Floss? What did you call it? ‘Coney Island’?”
Kate’s mother paused, serving a spoonful of peas. “‘Jones Beach,’” she said.
“Oh, right. Well, I knew it had the name of some swimming place.”
In Summer Light met with acclaim after its 1985 publication. Oneal also had also written two earlier YA novels, The Language of Goldfish (1980) and A Formal Feeling (1982, nominated for a National Book Award for Children’s Fiction). She penned children’s books and non-fiction. A Google search revealed that she was still teaching writing as recently as last year. But despite praise for Oneal’s work, all of her young adult novels appear to be out of print.
top photo: “Mixing the perfect colour,” flickr / Jill
In fourth grade, my Language Arts teacher read us The Trumpet of the Swan, a children’s novel by acclaimed American writer E. B. White.
The story opens when Montana boy Sam Beaver, on vacation in a remote part of Canada, discovers a nesting pair of swans. The boy saves the female swan—the pen—from a fox and becomes a trusted observer of the pair and their cygnets. The pen and cob soon discover that one of their newly hatched swans, Louis, cannot beep or honk. Louis (pronounced LOO-ee, like Louis Armstrong) proves himself a strong swimmer and flyer, but his parents worry that his inability to trumpet will harm his chances when it comes time to find a mate.
When he grows older, Louis’s desire to communicate drives him to seek out Sam Beaver, who brings the swan to school. Louis learns to read and write and thenceforth carries a slate and chalk around his neck. But this does not help him with other (non-writing, non-reading) swans, especially when young Louis falls in love with a pen named Serena.
The cob determines to help his son by stealing a trumpet from a music store in Billings. The debt weighs heavily on the cob, and Louis, with Sam’s help again, finds a job playing Taps and Reveille at Sam’s summer camp. Louis goes on to earn more money—and fame—playing trumpet for the swan boats in Boston, and in a club in Philadelphia.
Gigging proves lonely for Louis, but soon fate and high winds blow Serena into back into Louis’s life. She awakens after her journey to the sound of Louis playing Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer.” White writes, “It was love at long last for Louis; it was love at first sight for Serena.”
Louis wins the girl with his hard-earned skills. And after misadventures with the zookeepers, the swans fly back to Montana, where they give Louis’s father the money and the cob is able to discharge his debt.
White is best known for such children’s classics as Charlotte’s Web (1952) and Stuart Little (1945). But he is also an important figure in American letters; he wrote the essay “Here Is New York,” was the White of Strunk and White’sElements of Style, and was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. In a lot of ways, White has shaped what American literature is now.
Trumpet is a later work, written in 1970. Key facets of the novel have aged badly.
Trumpet is a later work, written in 1970. Key facets of the novel have aged badly. Louis himself and other characters refer to his disability in ways that are jarring and possibility upsetting to modern readers, and White frames Louis’s condition of “being without a voice” as a problem to be “overcome at last.” Sam Beaver is probably supposed have Native American blood, but the book never says outright that Sam is not white. It mentions several times that he is “like an Indian,” in appearance, in habit, in the way he walks by putting one foot in front of the other. Sam is also imbued with almost magical properties of being able to communicate with birds and animals, and always having solutions for Louis and his family when the need arises.
I suspect that my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Stephenson, had an agenda when she selected The Trumpet of the Swan to read to our class.
Fourth grade was the year that I left my English-language school and entered a French immersion program. Twelve—maybe thirteen—of us primarily Anglophone children went from being educated in one language to being thoroughly confused in another. For the first few weeks, we understood almost nothing that our teachers said to us: We didn’t know when we were being told to stand up. We couldn’t understand when we were asked sit down. Nevertheless, science and math took place in French. For music, we sang along to French records. Monsieur Campbell, who also taught an aerobics class in downtown Winnipeg, was our PE teacher. The only class that wasn’t conducted in French was Language Arts—English. It was such a relief to be able to do little things like read and speak.
Perhaps we did identify with Louis—I’m sure many of us did. But we didn’t come from nothing. Louis’s situation was imperfectly mapped onto ours; it allowed us to identify with the underdog—underbird?—without actually having to truly experience hardship.
And maybe Mrs. Stephenson chose to read The Trumpet of the Swan because it was a bit like how we were living in our first weeks of French immersion. Like Louis, we were unable to construct simple sentences, to make ourselves understood. We were unable to communicate.
But—that wasn’t the full story, was it? The difference was that we had our voices, and our teachers did actually understand English, they just chose not to speak it so that we could learn French. And we could talk to each other in English during recess or when the teacher wasn’t listening. We were not alone.
Perhaps we did identify with Louis—I’m sure many of us did. But we didn’t come from nothing. Louis’s situation was imperfectly mapped onto ours; it allowed us to identify with the underdog—underbird?—without actually having to truly experience hardship. We were in an environment engineered to make us helpless for a time, but which was ultimately about providing us with more tools, another language, more power.
After reading Trumpet, I thought about a passage that poet Patricia Lockwood tweeted about from Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot. Batuman writes:
I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, a Disney movie about a puny, weird looking circus elephant that everyone made fun of. As the story unfolded, I realized to my amazement that the kids in the class, even the bullies… were rooting against Dumbo’s tormentors… But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know?… Everyone thought they were Dumbo.
Lockwood was struck with it because, she notes, at this point in history, everyone thinks they’re the underdog. The current US administration is composed of billionaires who complain of being vilified by media and who tell themselves that they are being attacked by poor people, people of color, the disabled, LGBTQIA, and all combinations thereof.
And I realize that in the story I just recounted about starting French immersion, I elided facts and identities. I wrote as if my class was uniform in our confusion, in being English speakers. We weren’t the same. A couple of kids knew some French. And maybe some of us didn’t care or weren’t listening as avidly to the story about the musical swan. At least one girl in our class was First Nations, and I wonder what the Sam Beaver sections of the story meant to her—if anything. As I reflect on the differences among my classmates, I find that I can’t—shouldn’t—speak for who we might have been and our what our reactions were.
All I know is that I was eager to map myself onto Louis’s narrative.
It is seductive, this story of the underdog, but one key to its appeal is that fact that Louis propels himself upward and onward. It’s part of American mythology to imagine oneself starting off with nothing except maybe some bootstraps and a pair of biceps with which to pull oneself up. I was not even American, and I found myself drawn to it.
Adding to its power is the fact that the writer behind Louis’s story is E. B. White, shaper of American discourse. He writes of Louis’s journey:
Almost anybody can find Philadelphia who tries. Louis simply rose into the air with all his things around his neck, and when he was about a thousand feet high, he followed the railroad tracks to Providence, New London, New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford, Cos Cob, Greenwich, Port Chester, Rye, Mamaroneck, New Rochelle, Pelham, Mount Vernon, and the Bronx. When he saw the Empire State Building, he veered off to the right.
In passages like these, we can hear the voice of the author of “Here Is New York.” Louis is following well-worn American paths and White sweeps us along, allowing us to imagine traveling upward with Louis. But we don’t all begin at the same geographic points, and we don’t start out with the same amount of nothing.
But we don’t all begin at the same geographic points, and we don’t start out with the same amount of nothing.
At the end, with all their debts paid off, it would seem that Louis’s dealings with the world of money—and people—are done. Sam’s father asks him if he hears from Louis anymore.
“No,” replied Sam. “He doesn’t write anymore. He ran out of postage stamps and he has no money to buy stamps with.”
That’s not quite the truth.
Louis and Serena return year after year to the old campground, to the swan boats of Boston to play for a day, and to Philadelphia to visit the zoo and Sam, who has become a zookeeper there. At times, they deposit one of their needier cygnets there. Ostensibly, they have no need of money or people—they’re animals. Animals don’t need money. Unless they are not quite animals but stand-ins for something else; unless, as this whole story seems to indicate, they do.
Louis has so much at the end, and he is generous with his time and skills. He can afford it.
Central to Anne Stuart’s 1991 contemporary Southern Gothic romance, The Night of the Phantom are kidnappings, violence, fanaticism, revenge. There’s also attempted suicide, ableism and perhaps appropriative and exploitative depictions of race. Frankly, I lost count of possible issues one might have with this book because I got sucked in.
Again.
Let this serve as a warning.
On the eve of upstanding executive Megan Carey’s departure for a European sabbatical, she finds her construction-mogul father in his office pointing a gun at his head.
Reese Carey is threatened with exposure by reclusive, genius architect Ethan Winslowe, who has proof that Megan’s father knowingly ignored the specs and used shoddy materials in his projects causing the deaths of several people after a building collapse. At the time, flaws in Ethan’s intricate design were blamed and now Ethan wants Reese to show up at his isolated Arkansas home and beg for mercy.
Reese maneuvers his daughter to go in his place to negotiate with Ethan. Megan agrees, even after realizing that her father never intended to go through with suicide (the gun isn’t loaded and her father has already made travel arrangements for her). She arrives in Oak Grove, Arkansas, a creepy, unfriendly small town whose residents are prone to gnomic and menacing pronouncements about reclusive hometown boy, Ethan.
Megan finds her plans to plead for clemency for Reese and to move on with her European trip derailed. Her rental car is trapped in the mud. Ethan has no telephone. (?!?) And, oh yes, through his henchman, Salvatore, the mysterious architect demands that Megan stay on in his labyrinthine estate in place of Reese.
Ethan is rumored to be severely disfigured or ill, or kept alive on ventilators. In reality, he is not sickly; in fact, he’s prone to running miles and miles on his indoor track and hefting fainting ladies around his vast maze-like home.
Ethan is rumored to be severely disfigured or ill, or kept alive on ventilators. In reality, he is not sickly; in fact, he’s prone to running miles and miles on his indoor track and hefting fainting ladies around his vast maze-like home. (A robust-looking Fabio stares skeptically out from the original Harlequin American Romance cover, perhaps doubting his fitness to play the lean and agonized Ethan.) His so-called disfigurement consists of (spoiler) a dark birthmark which bisects his face and chest. (I spent some time before re-reading trying to remember where the birthmark ended and—uh—whether it split Ethan’s ween. It does not.) When he does finally meet Megan, he has her escorted to the bowels of his home and he speaks to her from the shadows. She’s moved to a succession of theme rooms every night: a tower room with a pallet, a Roman room featuring lewd frescoes, an angular, ultramodern pad—basically the worst fantasy honeymoon hotel in the world. He outfits her in diaphanous, low cut caftans and spies on her via video camera. Because of course he’s fascinated with her and she with him.
The story is a little Beauty and the Beast, a little Phantom of the Opera. Ethan sits at the center of it all, orchestrating a series of convoluted revenge plots against Megan’s father, against the town’s white-hooded, cross-burning religious fanatics who he blames for his father’s death.
The story is a little Beauty and the Beast, a little Phantom of the Opera. Ethan sits at the center of it all, orchestrating a series of convoluted revenge plots against Megan’s father, against the town’s white-hooded, cross-burning religious fanatics who he blames for his father’s death. A gentle but bossy garden ghost counsels Megan. And she and Ethan grow closer and more obsessed with each other until an angry fanatical mob descends on his house.
Phantom first was passed on to me in a box of Harlequins someone gave my parents in the early 1990s. I was 22 or 23.
Among the books was also a novel about a virginal Englishwoman who falls in love with the renowned Italian portraitist, and a romantic comedy about a crusty computer engineer who gets to know her boss via a proto online forum. I’d be interested in finding these novels again, but I don’t recall the names or the authors. I didn’t remember Anne Stuart’s name either, but Phantom is the one I managed to come across again years later—entirely by accident—while systematically (and obsessively) attempting (and failing) to read all of the New York Public Library’s romance e-books.
Phantom was part of a collection of re-issues, called appropriate enough Out of Print Gems, put out by Stuart herself. I began reading, and as Reese Carey started talking about his reclusive genius architect that recognition—and joy!—dawned.
I remembered this book. I remembered it because I devoured it greedily. And because this book was completely banana sandwiches.
Anne Stuart herself knows it. According to the introduction in Out of Print Gems, “I threw everything I had into the book, going completely over the top and holding nothing back.”
Now, Stuart is famous for male leads who skate on the edge of being irredeemable—some would say they are irredeemable. True to form, Ethan Winslowe is compelling, single-minded, great at sexing, the standout sociopath in a book rich with DSM-worthy personalities.
Phantom was popular and controversial enough to inspire the Silhouette Shadows line.
For Stuart, Phantom marked her turn into writing the dark stories with sinister heroes. Now, Stuart is famous for male leads who skate on the edge of being irredeemable—some would say they are irredeemable. True to form, Ethan Winslowe is compelling, single-minded, great at sexing, the standout sociopath in a book rich with DSM-worthy personalities.
In a lot of ways, Phantom is the kind of romance novel that people who hate romance novels point to when they argue that the genre is terrible. (I love romance novels and now I write them, so these are not my people and they probably wouldn’t much care for me, either.) There is, for example, Megan and Ethan’s relationship: Ethan blackmails Megan, lies to her, locks in her room and watches her in person and on video cameras. He leaves her with nothing but Stephen King novels to read. She cracks wise and protests her captivity, but Stuart herself alludes to Megan’s lassitude in face of Ethan’s sexual power.
“She was his to do whatever he wanted with, and if she felt passive, it was an oddly, intensely erotic passivity.”
Megan and Ethan do not always model a healthy relationship. But listen, at 22—an earnest and callow 22 at that—I got that this was so not the point of this particular book.
Hand in hand with this is the possibility that Ethan Winslowe can be read as biracial—as black. This is maybe not the accepted reading—the Fabio cover probably means most readers and editors default to white—and it wasn’t obvious to me before but now it is pretty much impossible for me not to read Ethan as black.
A far more troubling element for me now is how Ethan is presented as an exotic and uncontrollable Other, more legend than reality. Even after they knock boots, Megan spends more time discussing him with other people (and a ghost) than she does talking with Ethan himself. Hand in hand with this is the possibility that Ethan Winslowe can be read as biracial—as black. This is maybe not the accepted reading—the Fabio cover probably means most readers and editors default to white—and it wasn’t obvious to me before but now it is pretty much impossible for me not to read Ethan as black. I mean, look at the townspeople’s reaction to him:
They were dressed in white. White sheets to be exact, with hoods, eye holes cut out, and there had to be at least thirty of them…. In front of them, providing illumination, was a burning cross.
And aside from the Birth of a Nation scene, there is the fact that Ethan’s body is, y’know, two colors. (And he’s the initially scapegoat when Reese Carey’s—a white man’s—building/institution literally crumbles.) And believe me I really do understand that having a two-toned face and body is not how being biracial works but we’re not exactly reading a textbook here. The hints are there. But if this reading holds true, then this book, while sympathetic to Ethan, is also troublingly exploitative of him.
I don’t quite know what to do with this. I don’t know.
I found Night of the Phantom compelling and fascinating in the 1990s and it remains so for me in 2016, but it has never been a comfortable fascination.
I found Night of the Phantom compelling and fascinating in the 1990s and it remains so for me in 2016, but it has never been a comfortable fascination. Of course, finding pieces of pop culture, terrible, wonderful, appropriative, and enthralling—oftentimes all at the same time—is pretty much the permanent condition of living as a non-white woman in North America.
I read once that dreams aren’t really symbolic or portentous—that they’re just the place where the brain processes external stimulus.
Phantom is dreamlike in its overt use of symbols, but also in the way it processes all that cultural flotsam and jetsam, remaking stories that we’re told and re-tell, binding them together with the organizing principle of the happy ever after.
Megan wasn’t sure what she’d expected. Lon Chaney with his skeletal face in The Phantom of the Opera. Freddy Krueger, dripping blood. As Ethan Winslow turned slow to face her, she was ready to see almost anything. Except what she did see.
Stuart touches on Ethan as the Beast, or a creature of horror. At another point, Ethan gives Megan a ring with a picture of Janus, the two-faced god.
Another part of me really likes the idea that these cultural stories can be re-written, that outcomes can change—that eventually I can change them.
In Night of the Phantom we are given many stories. The alchemy of these elements what I respond to—this is what makes me find it compelling even while I don’t always know what to do with it, or how to find my way out. And in that refashioning lies—for me at least—some great part of romance’s power. Part of me finds its genre-ness fascinating; my mind enjoys the repetition and refinements of tropes, which are, after all, the themes and stories that propel our culture for better or for worse. Another part of me really likes the idea that these cultural stories can be re-written, that outcomes can change—that eventually I can change them.
(And other times I just like fun banter. I find that in romance, too.)
For me, romance novels serve many functions. They aren’t always escape or comfort reading, although that’s fine if they are. They don’t always reflect women’s desires, or supply role models, although sometimes they do.
For me, romance novels serve many functions. They aren’t always escape or comfort reading, although that’s fine if they are. They don’t always reflect women’s desires, or supply role models, although sometimes they do. After all, in that box in which I found Phantom back in the 1990s was also a book about a thorny female computer engineer. I’d be writing about that book, too, if I could find it again.
I reject the notion that all romance novels are crappily written, mass-produced heteronormative mommy porn, responsible for making women long for things they can’t have and also somehow setting women back hundreds of years. But I reject the standard response to these charges: that romance is actually super-duper feminist. That peppy vision of the genre is in its own way whitewashed; that notion seriously undervalues the motivations of readers and writers. What I do accept is that the genre is vast and heterogeneous, and that our reasons for reading it can be complicated and simple, and both at once.
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