2 books offer just the right summer mix of humor and nostalgia

Transcript

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has been preparing for the official start of summer, by what else? Reading. Here's part one of her summer books recommendations.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: Summer reading - for me, those words suggest an unhurried expanse of time to lose myself in a good story, fiction or nonfiction. Save the dystopian novels till the fall, please. Right now, I want books that glimmer like fireflies with dashes of humor and nostalgia. I've just read two that fit those summary specifications.

Catherine Newman's new novel is called "Sandwich," after the town on Cape Cod, where her characters have rented a cottage for one precious week every summer for the past 20 years. The title also winks at the situation of our main character, Rachel, nicknamed Rocky, who's halfway in age between her young adult children and her elderly parents, all of whom crowd into that ramshackle cottage. In the opening scene of "Sandwich," Rocky's husband, Nicky, stands paralyzed, plunger in hand before the cottages single, overflowing old toilet. As Rocky's vacation week progresses, other things also slosh and overflow - secrets, messy emotions like anger and shame and, as Rocky tells us, her own aging body. Menopause, she says, feels like a slow leak - thoughts leaking out of your head, flesh leaking out of your skin, fluid leaking out of your joints. You need a lube job is how you feel - body work.

Newman elegantly segues from Nora Ephron-like comic passages like that one to elegy. To return to the same place every summer, after all, is to be periodically brought up short by the passage of time. In the middle of the novel, for instance, Rocky uses another metaphor to describe her position and her family. And this time, her tone is infused with anticipatory grief. Life is a seesaw, Rocky says, and I am standing dead center, still and balanced, living kids on one side, living parents on the other, Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don't move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course. You have to.

"Sandwich" is my idea of the perfect summer novel, shimmering and substantive. One more aspect of Newman's book deserves highlighting. Like many other novels by bestselling female authors - I'm thinking of Jennifer Weiner, Ann Patchett and Megan Abbott - Newman introduces a storyline here about abortion. She writes about that contested subject and the emotions it engenders in a way that I've never encountered in fiction before.

As a city kid who grew up in an apartment without air conditioning, I have happy memories of seeking relief from the heat by wandering around grand New York department stores like Bloomingdales, Macy's and B. Altman. Julie Satow's new narrative history, called "When Women Ran Fifth Avenue," is a treat for anyone like me who yearns to time travel back to some of those palaces of consumption at the height of their grandeur. But even more revelatory are the stories Satow excavates of the women who presided over three of the greatest and now-vanished New York department stores - Bonwit Teller, Lord and Taylor and Henri Bendel.

Gertrude Stutz (ph) rescued Bendel's in the 1960s as shopping moved to the suburbs by turning its small size into an advantage, creating exclusive boutiques within the store that attracted customers like Gloria Vanderbilt, Cher and Barbara Streisand. Some 30 years earlier, Dorothy Shaver of Lord and Taylor, who Life Magazine dubbed America's No. 1 career woman, revolutionized fashion by championing the sporty American look at a time when French designers held sway. But the standout figure of the trio is Hortense Odlum, a self-described housewife whose husband bought a near bankrupt and sagging Bonwit Teller during the Great Depression and asked her to visit the store to judge it with a woman's eye. One of her first smash successes was the introduction of a hat department on the main floor. In 1934, Hortense became the first woman president of an American department store.

Satow specializes in entertaining cultural histories. Her previous book was a history of New York's Plaza Hotel. Here, she intersperses descriptions of such wonders as Salvador Dali-designed window displays at Bonwitz, with accounts of the racism pervasive in these department stores. For those readers immune to the allure of shopping or the shore, be assured that more summer reading recommendations, especially mysteries and crime novels, are coming your way.

MOSLEY: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Sandwich" by Catherine Newman and "When Women Ran Fifth Avenue" by Julie Satow. Coming up, TV critic David Bianculli reviews the drama series "Kafka." This is FRESH AIR.

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