If Manuel says that a dory’s canvas will hold the waves, it will hold them. If he were wrong, someone would be drowned. Only a writer can talk about what he doesn’t understand, without harming anybody.

We were working on my boat together, in the vinegar sun of early spring….

Yet another Robert Nathan book to review. They’re original and various, and they don’t cost much. I was very pleased with Long After Summer.

The book’s narrator, who never gives his name, is a writer, and he has a summer home on Cape Cod. There he lives among the fishermen, who have accepted him as part of the community. When he asks around for some woman to clean house for him, young Johanna finally shows up. She is an orphan, a relation of Manuel the fisherman. She is a girl who has never known love in her life, who has never had anything of her own. The author, pitying her, gives her one of his dog’s puppies, which she adores. But when she falls in love with a local boy, she gives the puppy to him, in the purity of her love.

Then tragedy strikes. Johanna’s reaction to her unthinkable loss unmoors her from time itself (that’s the fantasy element in this story, and it might not be fantasy at all), threatening her very life. The narrator, along with the sympathetic local Catholic priest, take great risks and bend the law to save her. The book’s ending – in familiar Robert Nathan style – is open-ended.

Long After Summer is now one of my favorite Robert Nathan books. I recommend it highly.