Seeking Sara Summers
Posted by Jean Roberta | Filed under Book reviews
Title: SEEKING SARA SUMMERS
Author: Susan Gabriel
Publisher: Wild Lily Arts, 2008
ISBN: 978-0615222073
Rating: 3 Stars
Genre: Literary
Novels about mid-life crises or, more specifically, about women who dump their husbands, change careers, go back to school, hit the road, or “come out” as lesbians, bisexuals, transmen or members of a BDSM community tend to be interesting studies in personality development. Considering that few people really change completely in middle age, an apparent change is usually based on the re-emergence of passions that have been buried for years. Since the birth of Second Wave feminism in the 1970s, coming-of-middle-age novels by and about women have sprung up as a variant form of bildungsroman, or novel of development. One U.S. critic named this type of women’s novel a reifungsroman, or novel of ripening.
Seeking Sara Summers is about a woman in her forties who is forced to think about death by the cancer that deprives her of a breast. Her three children are grown, and she realizes that she and her husband never had much in common; they were friends in high school and married each other because this felt comfortable and convenient at the time. Facing a recurrence of cancer, Sara must also face the fact that life can be short and shouldn’t be wasted. She remembers the one person who brought joy and excitement into her life before her marriage: Julia, her best friend and the one that Sara’s husband once hoped to marry.
What will become a cataclysm in Sara’s life begins with a random thought: Whatever happened to Julia? Sarah hasn’t heard from her in years, and still feels as if Julia abandoned her in high school when she moved to England with her well-educated parents. Sarah googles Julia’s “maiden” name, and is amazed to discover that Julia has become a successful artist, living in Florence, Italy. In effect, Julia has lived Sara’s fantasy life.
So far, so promising. Julia’s response to Sara’s email becomes a seed which brings Sara back from the brink of near-suicidal depression, and her husband Grady’s immediately negative, suspicious response seems realistic. He recognizes a threat when he sees one, and his feelings for Julia are still complicated. Julia’s invitation to Sara to visit her in Italy is like a grenade thrown into a house which was flimsy to start with. As a high school English teacher suffering from burnout, Sara longs for beauty and adventure.
As the reader can foresee, the plot thickens. Sara is clearly influenced by the Catholic iconography of her youth, especially images of the Virgin, a more visible and potent symbol in Italy than in traditionally Puritan New England. Although Sara doesn’t seem to have a value system of her own, it is clearly hard for her to give up a traditionally Catholic conception of marriage as unbreakable.
Julia’s and Sara’s rediscovery of each other and their working-through of a mutual sense of desertion, all under the golden light of the Tuscan sun, could have given rise to a richer novel than this one. Unfortunately, the central attraction of Sara to Julia and vice versa isn’t described vividly enough to persuade me that it has the volcanic force to change both women’s lives forever.
Julia reflects Sara back to herself in a way that looks almost unbelievably flattering. Julia tells her several times that Sara has a rare sweetness, yet this quality looks more like passivity than anything else. Sara supposedly teaches “the classics” to teenagers, yet her comments about Italy largely consist of repeating the word “beautiful” until she apologizes to Julia’s friends for repeating herself. Apparently she is too enchanted by everything she sees to express herself in more precise or colourful words.
Sara admits to Julia that she has been Republican all her life simply because she was following Grady’s lead; she seems completely devoid of political consciousness. During an idyllic moment in Italy, Sara is reminded of the life she temporarily escaped:
The Sunday New York Times was spread out on the bed in front of them. Sara skimmed the latest stories about their unpopular president [George Bush?] who at Grady’s suggestion she had voted for twice. Life in the States had continued on without her.
Neither Sara nor Julia discuss the reasons for the president’s unpopularity, nor why it might be a good thing for women, even married ones, to think about how they cast the votes that their feminist foremothers worked so hard to gain for them. When Julia unveils a painting of Sara which she made strictly from memory, the narrative voice expresses Sara’s unspoken response:
The woman in the painting looked too alive and beautiful to be her, even an imagined version. She held a boldness Sara had never felt she possessed.
Unfortunately, this reviewer also has trouble imagining Sara as “alive” (at the time the painting was made) or “bold,” although she seems attractive enough on the surface, precisely because she rarely does, says or wears anything which could possibly offend anyone.
Julia seems to have been spicier all her life, yet the artwork which has gained her an income and a reputation is not described clearly enough to visualize. More incredibly, Julia (as a beautiful, flamboyant woman in her forties), has never been erotically attracted to any woman besides Sara, or sufficiently interested in any man to form a committed relationship.
Philosophical and esthetic concepts are vaguely referred to in this novel. The architecture of Florence and Siena flash past the reader’s eyes like images seen from a train. Sara’s relationships with her widowed father, her brother, her children, her in-laws, her colleagues and her students are all repeatedly referred to in ways which don’t really shed enough light on them. Luckily, her husband gets to express himself in passages of dialogue.
I would love to cheer Sara on as she wrestles with a choice between two Significant Others, two lifestyles and two environments. I would love to swoon over the magic of love between two mature women who know what they want, and taste the wine from robust Italian grapes. Unfortunately, the magic doesn’t work for me. Other readers will undoubtedly see different things in this novel, but I can imagine the story this author could have told, based on the same plot premise, and it is altogether much bolder and more alive than this one.
REVIEWED BY JEAN ROBERTA
Kissed By Venus is a web site for the discussion and promotion of lesbian literature. We publish lesbian fiction, articles, book reviews, and interviews.
