Sitting on the Dock of the Bay Watching the Tides Roll Away...

It is a true and undeniable fact that once a week a large chunk of my paycheck will fleetingly exchange itself into bounded paper form. I don't know how to quit Borders. I'm like a junkie whose skin is crawling for the smell of paper, and even if I haven't finished my latest batch of books, I'm back trawling for more.

Yet there is another true fact about these excursions.

I can rarely find something even remotely relatable.

But that is another story, because for once I did find a book, and it just so happened to be about twentysomethings. It's called the The Last Summer (of You & Me) by Ann Brashares, who also wrote the Sister of the Traveling Pants series (that I never had an inkling to read). In her debut adult novel, she graduated with her adolescents and moved into young adults. The cover caught my eye, as it has two sisters plopped on a shoreline, and the blurbs all spoke about it being a coming of age tale and a great beach read. Well I've come of age and I'd rather be at the beach, so into my book stash it went.

And I read it. Amazingly enough I liked it. I even had a few euphoria moments of, "I can relate to this!" So like anyone from the internet obsessed generation, I'd figure I'd blog about it. Now despite the fact that I'm getting my master's in English, I'm not an English major, so this is not a literary review. There will be plot spoilers and will largely be focused on the author's handling of people on the verge of the beginning of their lives, and struggling with that new identity. Therefore if you want to be surprised, cease your reading now.

The Last Summer (of You & Me) is primarily about two sisters, Alice 21, Riley 24, and their lifelong friend Paul who is also 24. Every summer they've escaped to their family beach houses on Fire Island, a mere ferry's ride from their homes in Manhattan. Riley is the intrepid outdoorsy type whose dyslexia kept her from being the brains of the family, so she spends her summers being a life guard and her winters leading outdoor adventure groups. Alice is the classic overachieving younger sister who happens to be smarter, prettier, and desperately scared of usurping her much adored older sister. She over thinks and analyzes, and is terrified of both being left and leaving behind her sister. Then comes Paul. Best friend. Love Interest. Lost Soul. Classic Rich Bad Boy with an Attitude. He's got issues, no one understands him, Riley's his closest friend because she's his partner in crime, and more importantly she doesn't make him deal with his crap. He's also tragically in love with Alice, as she is with him, and yet neither will do anything about it out of fear. The book centers around their last summer, as they must face the decision of remaining static or growing up.

How's that for vague? I knew I couldn't write a real review, so in short it is the author's attempts at a grown up version of Peter Pan. Everything comes down to growing up and moving on, or dying. No literally. Riley, who remains a kind of perpetual child, doesn't have relationships, go to college, or have a 'real job,' dies. And you smell it coming from almost the first chapter. The author even begins with a J.M. Barrie quote, ""No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and all the rest." Once you realize that Riley is the girl who can't grow up, you see Alice and Paul in a strange dichotomy of supporting roles, while still being the main characters. It is like reading Peter Pan from the perspective of the Lost Boys. You see how much they are held back and limited by the aura of Peter Pen that draws them in to the world of just pretend. Riley, while no means as magnanimous a character, let's go of the past and ignores the future, and is content to stay exclusively within the confines of the latest adventure. No rock face is too steep nor wave too rough, and while she's fiercely loyal to Alice and Paul, she has no sense of neediness that the other two exude. While she stands still, the others are forced to avert their eyes and slow their pace so as not to surpass her. She doesn't fight against growing up, as Peter Pan did, she simply doesn't think of it. So clearly she dies.

Alice and Paul however, are the two who are actually grappling with the issue of being twentysomethings. Paul returns to Fire Island after two summers away, as jaded and desperate to belong as ever. He loves Alice. He hates Alice. He wants Alice. He wants to push her away. At every turn he is a mass of contradictions, terrified of reaching out to take what he wants from life. Everything about him is open ended. His family is absurdly wealthy, and his grandparents are fighting tooth and nail with his flake of a mother to secure his inheritance from his dead father. Therefore he hates money. He has all but a final philosophy paper to finish in order to close out his undergraduate degree, and he writes six pages every night, and then erases four. He has returned from California after failing to start an uprising among the low wage migrant field workers. He is a man-boy constantly on the cusp, and fighting it at every turn. Shockingly, he gives in, ravishes the girl, loses the girl when her sister is dying, and turns into a bitter schmuck convinced that all his bitterness was justified.

Alice is the care taker, who feels too much for those around her. Their hurt becomes hers, and despite her Ivy League law school acceptance, her inherently likability, and bright future, she willingly holds herself back to attempt to catch up with the older two. Perhaps with this character do we truly see the twentysomething struggle, as she has to define herself within her own terms, outside of her sister, and even away from Paul. All her life she had tried not to outshine her sister. She let Paul's snide remarks make her doubt her faith, her values, her life choices, even so muc as her love for him. Despite being the youngest of the three characters, she is clearly the most mature, and she is the one who makes the effort to seize the relationship she wants. And in the tradition of most literature, upon finding happiness, it is of course shattered by tragedy. The author's teen-lit background comes to the forefront, as Alice punishes herself for making love with Paul as Riley was falling ill. They are then kept apart through secrets and miscommunication, which you're well aware will work themselves out in the end.

Yet the meat of the book, comes during the fall, winter, and spring of Riley's illness. She is diagnosed with a heart disease that puts her on a transplant list, that never comes through. Here is this vital girl who lives in perpetual summer who is suddenly suffocating in holed up apartment with her parents. Alice is forced to watch as disease clips Peter Pan's proverbial wings; Riley gives up hope and has no use for a life of weakness. She refuses to tell Paul or submit to the humiliation of once again being her parent's child. Alice, as ever unable to move past Riley, moves home, defers law school, gives up Paul, and takes a job on the Central Park maintenance team, and in a hole in the wall drugstore. Every day her light dims, soon to be diminished alongside Riley. She is the healthy child living at home again, trying to maintain her independence and yet abide by the house rules. It is in this passage, that I think the experience is best captured:

"At one time, years before, Alice and Riley had made a big hole in the ceiling of their family's life and climbed out of it. Riley had enrolled in NOLS. She had spent an entire month of January in a hole in the snow. Alice had gone to college. Both of them had lived different places and met people. They'd cooked their food and washed their clothes- Riley mostly washing them in puddles in the backcountry, and Alice never separating dark from light. And now they were both back home. How quickly the hole in the ceiling grew back over their heads without even a scar to let you know it had once been open there. Healing wasn't always the best thing. Sometimes a hole was better left open. Sometimes it healed too thick and too well and left separate pieces fused and incompetent. And it was harder to reopen after that."
(pp.170-171)

How does a grown child fit their way back inside the nest they'd already left? The bed they'd outgrown, the curfews they'd dismissed, and the responsibilities they'd undertook as they'd set out on their own. More importantly, how do they ever find a way to leave it again? After the initial squeezing and jostling to fit through a jagged hole, the ease and comfort settles upon them. Big decisions can be made by someone else, meals are provided, and the terrifying real world can be put off for a little while longer. Alice settles into this routine, never thinking of or for herself as she wastes away in thankless jobs, ignoring her expensive BA from a private college. The whole world becomes a possibility when you never make the decision to step into it.

Ultimately Riley dies, slipping away without consequence while Alice works a late shift, proving that even if you stand still, the world does not. Paul sells his beach house when Alice leaves him behind, and Alice's parents choose to sell theirs now that Riley has passed. It is the end of the book, and the last summer in Neverland while Alice closes up the house. New children have moved next door, flocking to her while she prolongs her stay. She revels in the sweet innocence of childhood and teaching the next generation the tricks of island life. Predictably Paul comes and slowly they heal together in the last weekend of the summer. Without the anchor of Riley holding them back, they can leave Neverland and grow up, so hand in hand they take the last ferry of the season back to Manhattan.

The novel's ending is predictably bittersweet, as the couple gets their long awaited happily ever after. Alice has forsaken law school and is going into social work, moving out of her crappy jobs and doing something good in the world. Paul is doing grad school in Manhattan as well, and it is implied that soon they will live together, marry, and repeat the cycle of all those before them. Yet I find myself wondering if they're the ones who really won. Riley may be dead, but her ashes were thrown into the waves, to forever float among the dolphins. She may not be connected to the 'real world,' but she also won't face the mire of reality that weighed down their parents. Yes, we all must grow up and plug ourselves into the world, but must it come at the cost of everything we cherished as children? For Paul, he doubted that his love for Alice could follow him into adulthood, and it did, and he can carry it with him always. Still though, this implies that only that which can change with us can move with us throughout life. Sisterhood pacts and the beach houses that contain them must be left behind. Alice perhaps summarizes it best with one of the final passages of the book:

"So often this summer I keep thinking: I know I'm holding back. I know I'm waiting. I know I'm afraid to go forward. But I don't know how to get there from here.'... 'Sometimes I see it as a tricky mountain pass between two valleys. Other times, it's like perilous straits connecting two lands.
Partly it's the fear of the trip itself, I think, but partly it's the fear that I won't be able to get back. I'll turn around and the clouds will have settled over the mountaintop. Or the waters will have risen and shifted, there will be no way home.'....'But that's not even the real fear.'...'The real fear is that I won't want to go home.'" (p.291)

Growing up isn't just leaving home. It's Orpheus marching out of Hades and not looking back this time no matter how great the temptation. He had Eurydice by the hand, and he was taking the only thing that mattered with him. That was Paul and Alice on the last Ferry, in the last weekend, of the last summer of their childhood; moving forward with the only thing that mattered.

Because if you keep looking back and don't grow up, you get left behind.

Or you know.

You die.