Dark Harbor House

Many novels are about people with a past, but in this case the main character is a house with a past. Not only has the house been the host of many unusual circumstances and characters, but it is also past its prime and has fallen into disrepair, although still heavily inhabited. While the past is regularly revisited, the main story is about a group of people who spent a summer at the house in the late 1940's. The story concludes with the young men and women pairing up for a sexual conclusion to the summer and engaging in a reenactment of the great zucchini war. In between there are revelations of much of human behavior. The person closest to a main character is a man who calls himself Liam and is passing himself off as a fine arts student at Cornell University. His real name is Charles Liam Dwyer, and his change of name was an attempt to impress the others with his cultural sophistication. It also turns out that he is a student of animal husbandry rather than fine arts. Dark Harbor House was built by the moneyed class before the turn of the century and there are many additional buildings on the estate. Through the years, the people engaged in many eccentric pursuits, such as model trains, unusual diets, religious revival, voyeurism and many hinted sexual escapades. However, the titillating features are secondary to the characters and how they live out a summer vacation spent in their own version of fantasyland. The story moves along well, although with so many characters, it is at times difficult to keep all of them straight. While most of the characters are fictional, there are many instances of plot themes from other sources. There is a monsignor who claims to be able to use the new science of psychohistory to predict the future. Of course, this is from the Foundation series of science fiction books by Isaac Asimov. Furthermore, the predictions are all hopelessly wrong and it is clear that the monsignor is a muddle headed buffoon. The most amusing point of the book is the description of the lack of rubber for elastic during the war. This led to the occasional, unfortunate event of the elastic of women's panties failing and causing them to drop at inopportune moments. The funniest part was when the reteller of the tale noted that when it happened, there always seemed to be a man nearby who would say, " well, we all must make sacrifices for the war effort." This is not a novel with a powerful tale to relate. It is just a story about a group of typical, yet unusual people who summer together at an old house, sharing that part of their lives that they are willing to reveal. In that sense it works and I enjoyed it immensely.

A charming summer idyll that re-creates the gracious era of great houses, wealthy eccentrics, langourous flirtations among the well-mannered guests. The authentic period details and likable characters make this a wonderful vacation book...or a book to help recapture that hedonistic vacation mood.

Dark Harbor House is like a good dessert--delicious, satisfying and memorable. It is a combination drawing room comedy and coming of age story, set on a Maine island at the end of the 1940s, filled with genuinely funny, touching and believable characters, all of them keenly but gently observed, and written with care and verve. The book takes place in more innocent times than today, and yet there's plenty of delicious "hanky panky," as it was once called, and many other high jinks to smile at. It also features some intriguing background history involving, of all people, three turn-of-the century cereal kings, W. K. Kellogg, C.W. Post, and Dr. Ralston, as well as a pair of beautiful and eccentric female evangelists. If you feel the urge to escape the digital age for a few hours, I can think of no more felicitous way than to lose yourself in Dark Harbor House.