'The Last Summer' tests a trio's love, loyalty, and faith
The Last Summer (of You and Me), By Ann Brashares, Riverhead, 306 pp., $24.95
Ann Brashares's roots in young adult fiction are evident in "The Last Summer (of You and Me)," her first book for adults. Brashares is author of the best-selling series beginning with "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," and her "adult" novel reads very much like those four books for teenage girls: similarly endearing young heroes and familiar themes of sisterhood, friendship, love, loss, and growing up. The main difference is that "The Last Summer (of You and Me)" is a coming-of-age story and, over the course of one year and 300 fast pages, its trio of main characters crosses the threshold from adolescent youth to new adulthood. There is much heartache -- and some exuberant sex -- en route.
The story opens with the reunion on Fire Island of three old friends: Alice and Riley, sisters in their early 20s, and Paul, 24, with whom they have grown up over two decades of summers. A laconic, outdoorsy tomboy of a young woman, Riley has always been both the idol and the opposite of her little sister Alice. With her Ivy League brain ("You're supposed to be the smart one," Riley reminds Alice deep into the story), steadfast generosity, the small cross she wears around her neck, Alice is the sort who knits scarves and hats to express love. Yet the sisters are so close that Alice feels, as they lie with arms and shoulders touching on a beach where Riley's been the star lifeguard for six summers, that the "body of her sister was not quite like a separate body. . . . Like if she thought hard enough, she could make Riley's knee bend."
The sisters are as deeply connected with their summer neighbor Paul, only son of a largely absent mother and a father who died of a drug overdose when Paul was 4. He and Riley -- same age, same size until recently, same physical agility -- have always been best friends. Riley is Paul's "equal, his rival, his flipside. . . . In some ways, he found it hard to distinguish himself from her." Alice isn't his friend. She is "something else, neither more nor less but not the same." The difference is love, as inevitable for Alice and Paul as tomorrow's sunrise over the ocean. But what of the three-point balance of "what he'd had here on this island with Riley and Alice . . . the best and most lasting thing in his life"?
As a child, Alice was desperate to keep up with Riley and Paul. Now young adults, each knows the fear of being left behind. Add a sudden grave illness to this intimate triangle of friendship and love, and you have a "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants"-style rendering of Jean-Paul Sartre's play "No Exit," in which the socio-sexual dynamic between two women and a man after their death -- with their particular histories as living humans -- creates a single perfect hell for the deceased threesome. The agonies of Alice, Riley, and Paul are also relentless and sulfurous. Their ongoing rounds of miscommunication, silence, and rationalizations could be frustrating to read about if we weren't so accustomed to mishandling love and loyalties ourselves.
Questions of faith, guilt, retribution, and atonement do arise in "The Last Summer (of You and Me)," but the novel is a page-turner of a summer read and not "No Exit": Alice, Riley, and Paul divine a way out of seemingly eternal damnation. You'll be wondering what it is until the very last page.
Jane Bernstein is a writer who lives in Rhode Island. 
