SUMMER OF '69

Nantucket, not Woodstock, is the main attraction in
Hilderbrand’s (Winter in Paradise, 2018, etc.) bittersweet nostalgia
piece about the summer of 1969.

As is typical with Hilderbrand’s fiction, several members of a
family have their says. Here, that family is the “stitched together”
Foley-Levin clan, ruled over by the appropriately named matriarch, Exalta, aka
Nonny, mother of Kate Levin. Exalta’s Nantucket house, All’s Fair, also
appropriately named, is the main setting. Kate’s three older children, Blair,
24, Kirby, 20, and Tiger, 19, are products of her first marriage, to Wilder
Foley, a war veteran, who shot himself. Second husband David Levin is the
father of Jessie, who’s just turned 13. Tiger has been drafted and sends
dispatches to Jessie from Vietnam. Kirby has been arrested twice while
protesting the war in Boston. (Don’t tell Nonny!) Blair is married and
pregnant; her MIT astrophysicist husband, Angus, is depressive, controlling,
and deceitful—the unmelodramatic way Angus’ faults sneak up on both Blair and
the reader is only one example of Hilderbrand’s firm grasp on real life. Many
plot elements are specific to the year. Kirby is further rebelling by forgoing
Nantucket for rival island Martha’s Vineyard—and a hotel job close to
Chappaquiddick. Angus will be working at Mission Control for the Apollo 11 lunar landing. Kirby has
difficult romantic encounters, first with her arresting officer, then with a
black Harvard student whose mother has another reason, besides Kirby’s
whiteness, to distrust her. Pick, grandson of Exalta’s caretaker, is planning
to search for his hippie mother at Woodstock. Other complications seem very up-to-date:
a country club tennis coach is a predator and pedophile. Anti-Semitism lurks
beneath the club’s genteel veneer. Kate’s drinking has accelerated since
Tiger’s deployment overseas. Exalta’s toughness is seemingly untempered by
grandmotherly love. As always, Hilderbrand’s characters are utterly convincing
and immediately draw us into their problems, from petty to grave. Sometimes,
her densely packed tales seem to unravel toward the end. This is not one of
those times.

To use the parlance of the period, a highly relevant
retrospective.