Windchill Summer Norris Church Mailer Random House $250 TAKING YOUR first plunge into literary waters must be particularly unnerving when your husband is none other than the grand old egotist of American letters, Norman Mailer. But Norris Church Mailer makes her debut with aplomb, producing a breezy, flowing read that is part down-home coming-of-age tale, part loss-of-innocence war story and part murder mystery.
The author was a small-town art teacher in Arkansas before being whisked off to New York to become the sixth Mrs Norman Mailer. She draws on her own adolescence to paint a funny and touching portrait of the tail-end of the 60s in a hick town.
Cherry - tall, awkward and almost an albino - and her tiny Filipino friend Baby are sweating their way through their last boring summer in Sweet Valley, Arkansas before heading off to college. Boring, that is, until Cherry's childhood friend, Carlene, turns up drowned in the local lake. And then the mysterious Tripp Barlow appears, fresh from the horrors of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. He turns Cherry on to the pleasures of pot and sex, as she begins to develop doubts galore about the fundamentalist faith she's been raised in ('It was scary how good I was getting at sin' she muses).
Meantime, Baby's boyfriend Bean Boggs - another teenage war veteran - is acting weirder and weirder, freaking out on acid with the aptly-named Tripp and unable to escape his past as his platoon's star 'tunnel rat'. And then there are the strange and depraved parties going on at the Water Witch, a lakeside restaurant owned by a flashy Hong Kong businessman.
Mailer tells the story from multiple viewpoints - Cherry, Baby, Bean, even the dead Carlene, through letters to her boyfriend - producing a many-layered tale in which secret after dark secret is gradually revealed. The many horrors of the war seem all the more stark for the effect they have on a community so far from the front.