Summer Gone

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Canadian journalist and memoirist (The Danger Tree) Macfarlane makes his fiction debut with a spellbinding novel, evoking the magic and betrayals of childhood and the fleeting beauty of summer, "this poised moment, this skillfully held angle of time." Set largely in the wild reaches of northern Canada, the book employs a mysterious narrator to follow the life of disenchanted Bay Newling, divorced father of a 12-year-old son, Caz, and editor of a formerly prestigious cultural journal that, for financial reasons, has reinvented itself as a lifestyles magazine. Warned by his doctor that he is dangerously out of shape, Bay decides to bond with Caz on a canoe trip in the same region where Bay himself attended camp 36 years ago, in the pivotal summer of 1964. The story unfolds elliptically, travelling back and forth in time to trace the course of Bay's summers and, not incidentally, his life: the summer his infant sister died, the summer he wrecked his marriage with a quick fling, the summer his parents died in a freak accident. All these events are textured and filtered with the intensity and precision of poetry and embellished by the narrator, whose identity remains secret until the final pages. Macfarlane endows the season with a totemic grace, inscribing it as a breathless moment balanced between the new life of spring and autumn's edging toward death. This is an unabashedly nostalgic book, in which the Beatles still change lives, grown men escape into reverie and fish rise "to the lure of a yellow moon." Often melancholy, sometimes humorous, rarely false, Macfarlane's luminous prose is itself like summer: it shimmers. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

Macfarlane, a columnist for the Toronto Globe & Mail, earned a measure of admiration for Come from Away, which won the Canadian Authors' Association Award for nonfiction in 1992. This is his first venture into fiction. The gist of the tale is a bit hard to summarize, but it has to do with the editor of a Canadian monthly magazine recalling past summers and winters as he and his young son canoe through Ontario's northern lakes. Macfarlane skillfully evokes an atmosphere at once somber and slightly ominous, but the drama, instead of flowing smoothly, jerks and snaps from past to present, scene to scene, and person to person so that even an earnest attendant finds it difficult at times to follow. Setting and mores are described with an expert hand, but many readers are likely to be puzzled by the often irritatingly abrupt transitions, the curious mixture of present and past, and the intertwining of reality, dreaming, and the twilight in between. Of limited appeal; for collections of Canadian fiction.--A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Wolff

The rough landscape of northern Ontario takes on universal dimensions in Summer Gone, David Macfarlane's expertly controlled first novel...The novel's language -- perfectly tuned to guilt, responsibility and transcendence -- evokes the freshwater lakes and rivers that the characters navigate. Stories-within-stories gather force like tributaries. Finishing Summer Gone leaves the reader with a sense of loss -- not only the loss that inheres in Bay Newling's quiet tragedy, but the loss of the narrator's good company upon reaching the final page.
—The New York Times Book Review