The Silk Road

Paige Bergman, the first person narrator of Summer's richly textured but uneven debut novel, is an unhappy teenager who lives in Hell, a town in New York within commuting distance of New York City, in the late '60s. Paige hates her mother, finds high school, with the exception of her French class, irrelevant, despises her two friends and her boyfriend and obtains her one glimmer of hope from the presence of a mysterious, beautiful woman in a white Buick Skylark. (Cars play a major role in the novel, as lovingly described as Summer's human characters.) Paige's babysitting career leads her to the owner of the Skylark, which has metamorphosed into a red Barracuda: to say more would be to reveal all. It will be easy for many to identify with Paige's passion for unhappy homemaker Fiona Gallagher, and the sweetness of first love is evoked with a skill that crosses gender lines. In this story of girl-woman attraction, the woman is in no way a predator: Fiona emerges as a loving but troubled person who provides the dissatisfied girl with the only sunshine in her life. Paige herself is less satisfying: her vituperative hatred for a mother who seems no worse than average is disconcerting, and her general irritation with everything she sees is not endearing. In the first half of the narrative carelessness in grammar, tense, chronology and transitions get in the way of the story, giving the book the feel of a promising first draft. The writing becomes smoother in the second half, which is, unfortunately, marred by the conclusion, an awkward reminiscence by Paige's French teacher. Throughout, however, the novel is redeemed by sensuous language, spot-on period detail and tongue-in-cheek humor. (May)