Dean Bakopoulos’ third novel, Summerlong, chronicles one couple’s mid-marriage crisis and is inhabited by a small yet unforgettable cast of troubled souls. And it almost took place in Madison.
Christina Campbell
Bakopoulos almost set his steamy novel in Madison, but decided on his current home of Grinnell, Iowa, instead.
But the author, who earned his MFA at UW-Madison, felt the need to compress the story into a smaller and more isolated place. So Madison morphed into Grinnell, Iowa, which turned out to be the ideal setting for this intimate summer read.
“The novel traffics in coincidental encounters and how they can change our lives, and a place like Grinnell is perfect for that,” says Bakopoulos, who lives there. “It’s a small town that, because of [Grinnell] College, always has people wandering around in the middle of the night.”
A lot of people wander around in the middle of the night in Summerlong. After all, that’s how Claire Lowry, a lapsed writer and mother of two now pushing 40, meets Charlie Gulliver, a hunky former actor who just returned to Grinnell from the West Coast to settle his parents’ estate. At the exact moment of that encounter, Claire’s husband, popular real estate agent Don Lowry, is stoned in a hammock, nestled next to a recent Grinnell grad with a childish nickname ABC (Amelia Benitez-Coors) and a grown-up bisexual appetite.
Throughout the sweltering Iowa summer, the Lowrys, Charlie and ABC become erotically and emotionally entwined — forming an unlikely and sometimes uncomfortable bond. A geriatric widow, who lives with ABC and smokes massive amounts of weed, provides both hard-won wisdom and comic relief.
Bakopoulos, who wrote good chunks of Summerlong “in borrowed spaces” in Madison and Mineral Point last summer, based Claire on someone in Madison (though he’ll never say who!). With Claire as the foundational character, he’s created a sultry and compulsively readable story laced with lust, heartbreak and bleakness.
ECCO/HarperCollins Publishers
The book’s final dramatic scenes take place on the shores of Lake Superior, north of Duluth, Minn., with an ending that’s as unsettling as it is heartening. When you consider that My American Unhappiness, Bokopoulos’ second novel was, in his words, “one long mash note to Madison,” it’s clear the Michigan native has firmly established himself as a premier writer of contemporary Upper Midwest fiction.
If Summerlong has a shortcoming, it’s in the author’s unrealistic portrayal of the Lowry children, whose behavior seems more age-appropriate for kids younger than 10-year-old Wendy and 12-year-old Bryan.
The rest of the book, though? Very real. So real, in fact, that you’ll be thinking about Claire, Don, Charlie and ABC long after summer’s end.
