Summer Has Ended

Taking its title from the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah ("The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved," KJV), Ray Wright's novel renders a slice of hardscrabble life on a rented South Texas farm in the mid-1940s. Jeremy, adolescent son and only child of Lem and Olga Stroop, provides the filtering consciousness. Though less seasoned and crafty than Huck Finn, he is no less intelligent, curious, and resilient as he makes his way in a world that, for all its Bible Belt veneer, is earthy, raw, sexist, racist, cynical, profane, and often violent. For some three weeks in hot August, Jeremy is drawn repeatedly to a Pentecostal revival meeting in a local church and to its flamboyant preacher, Rev. Flancher. The boy's view of the world is narrow and innocent, and the answers he struggles toward are not easy or neat, but his determined search for a larger, more coherent world is richly human. The novel's prose is clear and direct, its details telling and precise, the dialogue lively and exact. And, in Wright's capable hands, the boy's quest for meaning and happiness becomes broad and timeless. -Harry Moore, author of Bearing the Farm Away and Beyond Paradise: The Unweeded Garden