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MY SUMMER VACATION

by Hugh Blanton

Grade school teachers not quite ready to start a new school year with a bunch of mucous-producing preteens would give their charges an easy first assignment of the year writing about what they did over summer vacation. It keeps the little shits quietly busy scribbling in their notebooks (‘My summer vacation was way more interesting than yours!’) and gives the teachers just one more precious day before they have to start planning lessons that will prepare their students for productive adult lives as social media influencers and anti-everything protesters. Then the class endures the stories of trips to lakes, to beaches, to Six Flags. Hot dogs barbecued. Fish caught. Dorky dads. Embarrassing moms. Somehow, a post-menopausal woman decided that the What-I-Did-Over-Summer-Vacation genre would make for a great novel. No, I’m not kidding.

* * *

Sandwich is the latest novel from Catherine Newman. Our family has a two decade tradition of spending summers in Sandwich, Massachusetts renting the same cottage with the same backed up septic tank every year. The two infants that began the tradition all those years ago are now adults, but they continue taking the vacation with their parents like some family even more loving and happy than The Waltons. (They even take their overweight tabby cat along.) The adult son, Jamie, even brought his girlfriend with him this year. Rocky, our main character and wife of Nick, is post-menopausal and never lets us forget about it. ‘You can actually hear the estrogen plummeting inside my larynx.’ ‘I weep and rage during sex.’ Describes her hot flashes: ‘As if your twat is personally shoveling coal into a terrible furnace.’

These are supposed to be the words and thoughts of an extroverted mom, but they just come off as cringey prose from a writer faking a sense of humor. The poor prose extends to other parts of the novel—long passages of what everybody is ordering to eat at restaurants, longer passages of the ingredients being used for cooking at home, chewing ‘thoughtfully,’ and Rocky even has dirty Top Chef dreams. This is suburban realism at its worst, people sitting around chewing and swallowing their food, forks scraping on plates, a vegetarian who occasionally eats clams. The sex scenes can be described as odd at best: ‘He taps me with one finger over my underpants, says, ‘Testing, testing. Is this thing on?’ ‘

All of this corny middle-class family life provides cover for the political messages the book tries to get out, almost as if Sandwich is an MSNBC segment. Rocky describes Sandwich: ‘This little hydrangea-filled Puritan colonizer beach town is completely overrun with New Yorkers.’ Rocky says she risked her life for abortion rights by escorting patients to clinics, although her daughter Willa poo-poos the exaggeration. Rocky wants to try a suppository for her thinning vaginal tissues, but isn’t sure if her insurance will cover it. She tells her friend Jo about the potential out-of-pocket costs and Jo rages: ‘The fact that our pussies just kind of dry up and blow away and people are profiting from that. The fact that Viagra is so much cheaper.’ There are quite a few shots taken at capitalism and the patriarchy throughout the book. (Climate change doesn’t get mentioned until the halfway point.)

The novel is divided into seven sections, one for each day of the week of their vacation. There are constant digressions to previous vacations when their adult children were just children. Rocky and Nick would let their children sleep in the same bed with them up until the oldest, Jamie, was six, which just kind of fits in with the weird closeness of the family. Sandwich is a beach read, a New York Times bestseller, and isn’t meant for intellectual stimulation although it does make a poor attempt at it. Near the end we get this Meaning of Life statement: ‘To say to each other I know how you feel.‘ The last time I heard that was after one dive bar day drinker told another that his hemorrhoids were killing him.

Sandwich
by Catherine Newman, 226 pages
HarperCollins, $26.99