SUMMER PEOPLE

The marriage of an aspiring poet and an academic with mental illness anchors Finigan’s novel about intersecting lives in a New England coastal town.

In 1981, Simmons College art major Catharine Conor meets Tom Osborne, who’s pursuing a doctorate in poetry at Harvard University, where his father, Noah, whom he disparages, is an esteemed professor and scholar on the work of Dante Alighieri. Catharine and Tom become romantically involved, yet there are already signs of Tom’s mental health struggles, which are later diagnosed as bipolar disorder. When Tom impulsively sets library stacks containing his father’s works on fire, the professor hushes up the incident and arranges for Tom to finish his degree in London. Catharine joins him there and marries him; they remain committed to each other after a miscarriage, and they later have a son in the 1980s. She starts writing poetry as an emotional outlet and relocates them to the Massachusetts coastal town of Belle Harbor, mortgaging a house with a small inheritance and attaining a job as a middle school art teacher. Tom’s father uses his connections to get his son, who’s now suffering writer’s block, a job at a community college. The narrative then expands to introduce Emma Nolan, who previously lived in the house and lost her son in an accident; Toby, Catharine and Tom’s son, whose life is upended by tragedy; and various “summer people” renting out the next-door cottage, such as teenager Bree, whose interactions with locals have disastrous consequences. By novel’s end, Catharine follows through on a promise to a special person in her life.

This latest novel by Finigan may remind readers of such short story cycles as Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008), given its sweeping presentation of several characters in a small town. The narrative explores their relationships to one another in ways that are sometimes-glancing but often profound. Catharine, Tom, and Toby receive the most attention, but Finigan’s chapter on Bree, and her return later in the novel, allows for a striking demonstration of how one person’s actions can resonate across several lives. The book’s most effective element, though, is its heartbreaking portrayal of mental illness. Catharine believes that Tom is brilliant, as do his awful parents (portrayed in several memorably chilling scenes), and he experiences periods of “whirlwind of hope and possibility,” then increasingly wonders “how long he could stave off what he knew would follow. Each descent worse than the last.” A scene in which Tom holds Toby aloft as a child, during a Christmas Revels dance, serves as a well-drawn example of how Tom’s exuberance has a dangerous edge; so, too, do some of his worrying musings: “More and more his thoughts seemed to wander to the borderline, the edge of the beyond. What was out there?” His loved ones’ uncertainty about him, and his intentions, becomes a fitting element of this cross-cutting story, which effectively examines the wide-ranging impact of individual actions.

An ambitious and affecting interweaving of troubled characters’ lives.