A Certain Kind of Girl

Of late I've been reading a book for school, called Seventeenth Summer, by Maureen Daly. It was written in 1942, and is the pre-class reading--what would be "summer reading," if it wasn't a summer class, in which, I suppose, all reading is technically summer reading. Given the nature of the rest of the syllabus, which is very recent in publication date and modern in style, I have to assume this book is just for contrast.

Rarely have I found a book this hard to read. Honestly, I would have put it down if it wasn't for a grade, and I would have skimmed it if I wasn't awful at skimming. As it is, I dodged through many a long paragraph about how her garden is coming up or what the wind of the lake is doing to the grass and tree branches. If it had chapter breaks, it might have been more skimmable, but it doesn't. It's just three long months of the main character, Angie, falling in love during the summer after high school and before college.

I was walking up the street yesterday and I passed a rose bush, with huge yellow roses just at the end of themselves--wide open to the point of drooping, where the petals begin to part from each other and no longer quite form a coherent blossom. The smell was rich and lush, and what I thought when I saw them is that Angie is the kind of girl who would find full-blown roses uncomfortably sexual. She wouldn't be able to define it that way, but she'd sense that something wanton and sensual was going on and probably blush and avert her eyes, for fear of spoiling her innocence. This is not a person you would ever meet today.

I'm also listening to Rebecca, by Daphne DuMaurier, which is long overdue, I have to say. The main character of that book is also this type of person--I think, in fact, that she actually, literally turns her eyes away from full-blown roses at some point in the book specifically because they're so embarrassing. It's hard to remember--English gardens take up so much of the text, it's hard to remember exactly which flowers have been gawked at already.

I've seen the movie of Rebecca, with Joan Fontaine and Lawrence Olivier, so I know the outline of the story. And I've had the differences between the book and the movie explained to me, so I have a clear idea of where we're going with this book. It's interesting, because it's clearly a story that is all about innocence vs. --what? Experience? Guilt? Ennui? All of those things. It's about being 19, and how you don't really know what's going on at all in the world then. Which is not how the world today seems to think--that the wisdom of 19 isn't worth anything, and that you're not really a person with your wits about you till you're 36.

Seventeenth Summer also thinks this. Angie is 17, has graduated from high school, and is not allowed to go steady. Her parents don't approve of how much time she spends with Jack, and even she doesn't believe she can really feel this way, because she's so young. Have you, in your life today, ever encountered someone who didn't believe that a person of 17 could feel passionately in love with someone? It's the most terrifying time for that sort of feeling--it's all that those kids are going through, all the time.

Between these two books, I'm being subsumed into a world of naivete, sweet romance, and confusion about the world. I know that Rebecca will put an end to my stay at this saccharine hotel very soon, but I think I'm going to have to read something base and violent very soon, just to get a hold of myself. The new James Bond book, maybe, or something I picked up at the library called The Arsonist's Guide to Literary Homes of New England. How can you go wrong with a title like that?