Indian summer
(Book)

"Indian Summer is John Knowles' third novel, one generation beyond A Separate Peace but again making an opposition of contrasts between two young men, this time less private and more extensive in implication. Cleet Kinsolving, something of a loner, as "unshakable" as his Indian grandmother, returns from the war (1946) with an inviolable sense of who he is and what life should be. He's determined not to "fall behind in the Indian summer of brief, too late, doomed flowering." This is what he seems most likely to do when he agrees to go back to his Connecticut home town with successful, patronisingly protective Neil Reardon, his oldest, closest friend. Cleet is only a hanger-on in the Rearden household which represents not only philistine virtues (power, tradition, and money) but an energetic productivity and strangulating conservatism. Neil has married a Southern girl, Georgia, whose family are now there too, and they also are sore thumbs. Cleet, however, is on the same frequency with Georgia's father who maintains a certain quixotic, naive nobility in failure. But at the close, he manages to make the break to "go through life" on his own, instead of "slipping around it" (Neil).... Knowles tells his story in a direct, declarative fashion which has a good deal of Cleet's vulnerable honesty. And he has something to say, refuting the patterns which crib and confine, asserting the life of instinct and imagination. The straightforward strength of the book is hard to isolate but it's there-- close to Cleet's uncomplicated, uncompromising center of vision."--Kirkus

BSLW RECAT 2023