The Summer Before the Dark

"Around the time when the idea of the midlife crisis was being popularised in the 70s, there was a spate of novelistic representations of midlife crises. The Summer Before the Dark is emblematic and symptomatic; it’s a canonical depiction of the stereotypical female midlife crisis of the 1970s. It’s about a forty-five year old woman who has grown-up children and whose husband is going away for work for six months. She is at a loss with what to do with herself, but she happens to be fluent in several languages and gets hired by a global foods company. She goes off to Istanbul and begins a series of adventures about which she’s very conflicted and ambivalent. “When the phrase ‘midlife crisis’ originates, which is in a 1965 essay by Elliott Jacques called “Death and the mid-life crisis,” he is talking about people in their mid- to late thirties. ” It’s a really great investigation of the cultural moment of nascent feminism of the 1970s through the lens of a middle-aged woman trying to change her life. Interestingly, the main character, Kate Brown, is the absolute focus of the novel and her family is incredibly peripheral and thinly sketched. So, there’s a sort of inversion: she has been defined as wife and mother, but in the novel it is others who appear as schematic figures of ‘husband’ and ‘grown children’. She is the centre of attention. One thing I love about the novel is the way in which, although it is quite socially specific, it very powerfully connects with broader issues about poverty, social justice, and the meaning of life . It has moments in which it telescopes very beautifully from the particularity of Kate’s situation to very profound and utterly general questions about what to do with life and what makes it meaningful. Absolutely. I think it’s really interesting that you should connect this with the idea of not accepting roles that have been given to you, because one of the pivotal scenes in the novel is one in which Kate, having come back from an affair with a young man in Spain, goes to the theatre, and there is an extended meditation on the absurdity of people playing roles on stage. (I think she goes to see Turgenev’s A Month in the Country .) As she watches, she looks around at the audience, at these affluent people dressed up for a night out, and reflects on the performance of social roles and what it would mean to throw them off. It’s slightly heavy-handed, but it works. And it picks up exactly on the thing you were pointing to: the existentialist sense of the importance of recognising one’s own autonomy and not simply accepting given social roles. So, the novel definitely has that as a theme."