Review: 'The Summer Friend,' by Charles McGrath

In these times of dire memoirs — hard stories by survivors of war and abuse, emigration and illness — is there a place for an older white guy recalling golden summers of golf and boating? I think there is, when it's written as tenderly as "The Summer Friend," Charles McGrath's ode to friendship and nostalgia.

The friend in the title is Chip Gillespie, a guy McGrath (also known as Chip) meets one summer when their kids are still young. The McGrath family rents a beach house in the Massachusetts town where Gillespie and his wife live. The two couples meet at a square dance, "of all things," McGrath writes, and find they have a lot in common — not just the same nickname, but a love of sailing, sons named Ben, daughters the same age. From there springs a lifelong friendship that plays out mostly over the months of summer.

McGrath's memoir is as much about his childhood summers as it is about his summers as a grown-up, and he moves back and forth seamlessly between second person (for the general) and first person (for the specific). That shift keeps the tone intimate but not overwhelmingly self-centered. These things I'm writing about, McGrath seems to say, are things we all understand.

What prompted the memoir, of course, was Chip's death. While the death is mentioned only lightly for much of the book, it hangs over the happy sundrenched chapters, giving them weight.

McGrath writes about golf games and boating excursions in perhaps more detail than most would want to read, but the poignancy of the final chapters is genuinely touching. Anyone who has lost a friend will understand.

Laurie Hertzel is the senior editor for books at the Star Tribune.

The Summer Friend

By: Charles McGrath.

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 227 pages, $25.