The Last Summer of the World

One of the most exhilarating aspects of reading literary fiction is that it can illuminate little known facts about previously unknown people and places and historical events. This is particularly the case with famed photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator, Edward Steichen (1879 -1973) who comes to life from deep within the pages of Emily Mitchell's multi-layered and achingly exquisite first novel The Last Summer of the World. Having established himself as a fine art painter in the beginning of the 20th century, Edward Steichen assumed the pictorialist approach to photography and in 1905 helped create the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession with Alfred Stieglitz in New York. In World War I he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces which gave him the opportunity to become dangerously involved with aerial photography. Deeply shocked by what he witnessed on the Western Front, Steichen however, ended up denouncing impressionistic photography. Thus, in Mitchell's accomplished hands, this early period of Steichen's kaleidoscopic life gradually emerges as a tale of creative growth and emotional pain delivered in a series of moving accounts that move back and forth between Steichen's artistic beginnings in Milwaukee in 1898 to the anguished and bitter divorce from his wife Clara even as he settles in France at the end of the Great War. We first meet Edward when he is working for the British, in Northern France as one of the observers, working with the pilots to take pictures over the various sectors of the front lines. Developed, printed and assessed, the photos would then be examined by the interpreters would examine them for the sign of smoke, and anything else that may lie behind the front lines. One clear and beautiful morning a letter from his friend Marion Beckett comes by the first post. Edward recalls that it has been four long years since he had last seen her, the last summer before the war began. Marion tells him that his wife Clara has filed suit against her in New York, accusing Marion of having had a liaison with him before the war and if the suit does indeed come to trial, Marion will need Edward's help to counter the accusations against her and against him too. It seems too outlandish, too unlikely even for someone with Clara's penchant for dramatics. Fuelled by a sense of self-righteous anger, Edward reckons the easiest thing is to do nothing at all as Marion's letter does not request any specific action, except to help when the time came. The most powerful impulse tells him to go and find Marion as the letter reveals to him that she is in France now and working as a nurse for the War effort. Perhaps the family friend the cantankerous talkative Mildred Aldrich, who a second mother to Clara their neighbor in Marne, someone who might have the chance of convincing Clara to pull back from her present disastrous course. So begins Edward's odyssey as he tries to reconcile h

This is one of the best novels I've read in a long time. I really admired the writing itself---beautiful and restrained and elegant---and how the era seemed so deeply researched but came off as authentic and lived-in. I was completely absorbed by it and look forward to whatever Mitchell writes next.

This first novel by a young author is a fascinating use of historical and biographical material, well blended with imagination, to create a novel about an important period in the life of the great photographer, Edward Steichen. I found the analysis of artistic temperament, and of emotions, extremely well done, with mature insight. I also "enjoyed" the evocation of World War I in France.

Thanks to Emily Mitchell for giving us one of those extraordinary novels that remain in the mind, evoking strong feelings and provoking new thoughts long after one turns the last page. Mitchell's subtle, unmannered, and decisive prose is a non-stop pleasure to read. Her story steadily gains momentum until, at the end, one feels the wind whistling past one's ears and hangs on for dear life. Most impressive, perhaps, is the refusal of this novel to play to type. TLSW is not a love story set against the "background" of war but a meditation on love and war that involves us in the interplay of spontaneous sentiments and a powerful (indeed, hyperactive) social environment. Similarly, despite the author's obvious sympathy for Clara Steichen's plight in a male-dominated culture, the book escapes categorization as either a feminist or implicitly gendered novel. Mitchell's empathetic imagination permits us to enter so deeply into the inner lives of both Edward and Clara that "taking sides" between them finally seeems reductionist and irrelevant. Glamorous, creative, confused, yearning for personal meaning and social peace, they were who they were, and Emily Mitchell has made them live again for us.

I wrote the Publishers Weekly review reprinted above, and want to add a follow-up: Few novels I've read in recent years have stayed with me as much as the Last Summer of the World. I find myself often wanting to recommend it to people, so I'll do that here as well. A beautifully written, deeply imagined book that is a pleasure to read.