New York: Grove, 2003. Hardcover, 273 pages.
This book serves as a guide, not only with recipes for good eating but with personalized examples of the good life, as witnessed by the author where he summers on Mount Desert. His how-to for happiness, in an over-simplification of the book’s storyline, might read as a recipe. That process starts with a guy and a gal who have both written about the Vietnam War and politics. Add sweetness; romantically combine them in mid-life. Next, add salt; place in a beautiful location on the coast of Maine every summer. Be careful not to allow the ingredients to become hedonistic; sprinkle with the virtues of working on vacation, skinny dipping in the ocean, and enjoying the fog. Mussels and mushrooms may be added copiously but use lobsters sparingly. Occasionally combine with porchbending*. Add in a reunion with a disappeared dad. This mix results in contentment, a sense of family, and a love of locale. But where’s the meat of the story? That’s where the subtext comes in.
Sterba, a veteran journalist who covered the Vietnam War and Washington for the New York Times and Washington Post, sentimentally documents one summer – 1991 – early in his marriage to Frances (Frankie) FitzGerald. She’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a book about Vietnam, Fire in the Lake. Frankie has a place on Somes Sound near Northeast Harbor. Frankie’s family has been summering in this area for over one hundred years. Here’s the meat of the story: Frankie’s family, the Peabodys on her mother’s side, has high standing and long membership in New England’s aristocracy. Sterba is a complete outsider to this, but feels welcomed into the fold. The corollary he seems to suggest is that anyone could be. But Sterba is too smart to be that naive. He objected to a recent book review where Frankie was described as a woman of “inherited wealth.” So, if they’re not rich, are they comfortable, meaning they enjoy the privilege and prestige that wealth and class confer? Sterba would be somewhat disingenuous to suggest that status makes no difference. Does he really think this is a “just folks” way of spending summers? With this book joining Ved Mehta’s Dark Harbor (WWF, October 2003), we now have two memoirs by two writers married to women of means, offering guides to a rarefied life on the Maine coast. Mehta is more direct in telling us the rich are different, and he’d rather live like the rich. Sterba sets up as a target a mythic “snooty Philadelphian in full snoot” to symbolize everything that could look obnoxious about the very rich, then, because he never sights one of “them,” appears to avoid anything snooty. But when was the last time you and your spouse got piped aboard tycoon Malcolm Forbes’s yacht for cocktails? (If you liked Mehta’s name-dropping, you’ll like Sterba’s too). Have we gotten Sterba’s book now because that cherished and long-insular life appears under siege from new money? “Camps” can be bought and torn down, replaced by “McMansions.” Some parts of the Maine coast are beginning to look as glitzy as – gasp – Connecticut. Indeed, Sterba and Frankie watch and worry as one of those overdone summer places is built next to them. Ironically, they refer to the construction site as Jurassic Park, a reference to the otherworldly-appearing earthmoving equipment and its damage. But one could ask, exactly who are the dinosaurs here? Without sentimental attachment to the traditions of those elite enclaves, one is forced to admit: times change, places change. Sterba’s book appears to offer a paean to a certain way of life and it isn’t just a toast to familial bliss.
Tina Cohen writes from Vinalhaven and Deerfield, MA.
* “Porchbending” is the opportunity to quaff cocktails on someone’s porch.