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''I'm not Evangeline, Rex''
She wasn't. No one was.
It's that time of the year when I read a Richard Godwin novel and it makes me inexplicably happy. It's a pleasure so peculiar, it's hard to define. He tends to provoke strong reactions out of me whatever he writes. The horribly vivid descriptions in APOSTLE RISING gave me nightmares, the overwhelming perversity in MR. GLAMOUR weirded me out and the Mustard Man...well...he's the Mustard Man, right? I never thought I'd root for a culinary villain, but I did. As reckless and turbulent Richard Godwin's previous work has been, every road lead to ONE LOST SUMMER. It's the novel where Godwin harnesses all that wild energy and channels it into one graceful, seamless and oh-so-disturbing narrative. Think THE GREAT GATSBY meets BLUE VELVET.
Rex Allen just moved into a new, well at ease neighborhood. He seems harmless enough and the neighborhood leader, gut-wrenching beauty Evangeline Glass, invites her to one of her parties. But Rex is a man that knows what he wants and what he wants is Evangeline. He sees something special in her and starts observing her from his house and compulsively filming her. Rex gains interesting insight on Evangeline, like that she's having an affair! What he had in mind for her was blackmail and a strange, oddly perverted and fascinating game of power and identity. And man, does it get fucked up between those two. As Rex pushes Evangeline to the borders of her self, truth starts emerging about Rex too.
ONE LOST SUMMER works so brilliantly well due to one simple decision : it's written in the first-person point of view of Rex. So the novel is blissfully unaware that it is twisted. Rex is calmly and methodically executing his plan and the reader is left with subtle narrative cues that he's not right in the head. For example, that his background story is not introduced. He's just Rex, who recently moved in, even if it's him who is doing the talking. If the novel was written in third person, he would have raised suspicion and fascination right away, it would have been too tempting to paint an exhausted picture of him as a lonely wreck. There is something morally liberating to root for the blackmailer. Because he IS the one character you are supposed to root for. The one untainted by the superficial grind of neighborhood life.
How much does identity belongs to us? It is based on unreliable things. Memory can be taken away. The character can be altered. Perhaps it was the vaccuum in my soul that made me hunger for Evangeline and devour her confusion.
Another fascinating aspect of ONE LOST SUMMER is its themes of control and beauty. Richard Godwin has its own ideas about how a man can gain somewhat that everybody wants and mold it to his liking. He has obviously made his homework and thoroughly researched how you reprogram somebody. Evangeline is controlling everybody with her beauty, getting whatever she wants, whenever she wants and yet, Rex doesn't have anything to control Evangeline except her own beauty, which he turns against her to send her into a profound introspection about the vacuity of her existence. The change that Rex triggers in her is nothing short of spectacular. There are very few characters in ONE LOST SUMMER but they are so well-developped that they occupy all the space they deserve.
I stayed up late to finish ONE LOST SUMMER. It set my mind on fire and taught me a thing or two. I really liked Richard Godwin's previous novels, but this one is noticeably better. It had more restraint and channels its energy into creating verbal standoffs between character and into creating a hyper-complex character in Rex. I more or less disagreed with the ending, but it was more a philosophical disagreement than an actual flaw. ONE LOST SUMMER is one truly original psychological thriller. It breathes a new life into the most tired subgenre of crime fiction. It's the kind of novel that makes cerebral fiction sexy again.
BADASS