On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever

Who is burning down the houses of summer people in the New Hampshire village of Pomeroy? This question passes for a mystery in Sue Miller’s The Arsonist (Doubleday/Knopf, digital galley), but it’s just an excuse for Miller to explore the familiar territory of home and family. Well-crafted and thoughtful, the novel isn’t as good as Miller’s best — Family Pictures and While I Was Gone are my favorites — but it’s much. much better than, say, The Distinguished Guest, even while exploring similar themes.

Frankie Rowley, burned out as an aid worker in East Africa after 15 years, returns to her parents’ summer home, where they have decided to retire. Her mother Sylvia is squashing her doubts, distressed by her husband Alfie’s increasing memory loss that she can no longer attribute to his being the absent-minded professor. Frankie’s sister Liz, her hands full with husband and children, is happy for Frankie to take on their parents’ problems. Frankie, uncertain about her own future, is pulled out of her introspection by the rash of fires that threaten the town’s sense of community and by her attraction to local newspaper editor Bud, another outsider.

Miller’s writing is elegant and detailed (sometimes too detailed) as she depicts the risks, rewards and responsibilities of family love, the meaning of home. As Alfie declines into dementia, Sylvia realizes she has been unhappily married for a long time; she feels life closing in on her. By contrast, Frankie faces the possibility of a new, more permanent kind of middle age. The story takes place largely over the course of one summer in the mid-1990s, with Miller making a few references to the future near the end, of the “years later, he would see” kind of thing. It’s an unnecessary tidying up of loose ends by a writer who knows that the messiness of real life is what makes it real. Still, I liked the story’s hopeful heart.

Hope is rewarded in Bret Anthony Johnston’s first novel Remember Me Like This (Random House, digital galley) when an abducted son is returned to his south Texas family after four years. Although life has stood still for the Campbells in some ways since the day Justin walked out the house with his skateboard, it has moved forward, too. Eric, a history teacher, is having a half-hearted affair with a local surgeon’s wife, while his wife Laura finds solace as a volunteer monitoring a sick dolphin at a nearby marine lab. Son Griffin is 13 now, the age Justin was when he disappeared. He’s into skateboarding and his first girlfriend. Having Justin home, with all the accompanying questions about what happened to him in the interim, complicates family life in unforseen ways.

The police have arrested a Corpus Christi man who turns out to be the son of an acquaintance of Justin’s grandfather, Cecil. Although Cecil declares Justin’s return has been a boom to his pawn shop business, he is enraged when the alleged abductor is released on bail. Eric takes to spying on the man’s house and joins his dad in plotting revenge. Laura tries to hold the family together and make sure Justin goes to counseling. Griffin gets into a fight defending Justin at the skateboard park. As for Justin, he sleeps during the day and keeps to himself at night.

Johnston is a psychologically astute writer who charts the family’s shifting dynamics with sensitivity. Even the secondary characters are well-drawn, especially Griffin’s girlfriend Fiona, whose bohemian looks and clothes can’t hide a tender soul.  But the only family member whose life isn’t unsettled by Justin’s return is the Labrador retriever Rainbow. She’s just happy he’s home.