No escaping the summer
Even though the weather is always there, the heat and humidity of August can sometimes make the weather seem particularly inescapable. This all-encompassing anticipation is at the heart of the novel Wide Blue Yonder by award-winning writer Jean Thompson.
The weather is the main focus of Uncle Harvey’s existence. The story’s central character, Harvey is a mildly senile, nearly-blind devotee of The Weather Channel. An anti-social eccentric, Harvey’s only connection to the outside world are the daily phone calls from fellow citizens of Springfield, Illinois curious about the Local Forecast.
Harvey is not all alone. His (former) niece-in-law Elaine takes care of him. Very much in the middle of a mid-life crisis, Elaine is resigned to her sad existence. She fills her time by working at her boutique and attempting to have a relationship with her daughter, Josie.
Josie, Elaine’s daughter, is yet another of Thompson’s convincing, sympathetic characters. Josie is a typical seventeen-year-old, bored with her daily life in Springfield, and unconvinced that she can find either happiness (she takes after her mother in this regard) or true love. This all changes when Josie falls for Mitch, a “comic-book handsome” local police officer whom she first meets while behind the cash register at Taco Bell.
The anticipation and tension of approaching summer weather is also a metaphor for the approaching drifter Rolando, a possibly-schizophrenic thug from California who is hell-bent on revenge for all the past wrongs that have been inflicted on him.
Though the plot meanders along, it doesn’t really matter because of Thompson’s great character descriptions. Josie is one of the most fully-realized, interesting teenage girls I’ve ever encountered in a book. Elaine and Harvey are similarly fleshed-out people. Still, with all the book’s brooding anticipation, the ending is a somewhat disappointing surprise. Thompson spends the novel building up a sense of fatalistic inevitability, yet ends it with cheesy sentiment.
Regardless of its shortcomings, Wide Blue Yonder shines due to Thompson’s great writing style and outstanding character development. It’s a great late-summer read for anyone who likes quirky suspense novels.
Add comment August 5th, 2008 Brendan