Indian Summer is a selection of the Literary Guild, and in the Guild's bulletin for August, Knowles says that the book "came about through the collision in my mind of two things: a strange little town I knew in Connecticut, and the friendships I have formed with people who later turned out to be very rich." This, however, was not the whole story: "But in essence what I tried for in Indian Summer was neither a novel of place nor a novel about great wealth. I wished instead to express the plight, and the wide dreams, of a certain kind of young American, one who has had to come down in the world."

It is with the young American, Cleet Kinsolving, that the novel begins—on the day in 1946 on which he was discharged from the Army Air Force. Although he didn't know exactly what he wanted to do, he was full of optimism….

Not much of a mixer, Cleet has had one close boyhood friend, Neil Reardon, heir to a large fortune, and that is how the rich come into the story. Neil, who has come out of the service with political ambitions, lectures at a nearby college and Cleet goes to see him. Immediately Cleet is seized upon by the Reardons, and the next thing he knows he is back in Wetherford, Connecticut.

Knowles does fairly well with Wetherford…. Although it still looks like an old New England town, most of the old families have vanished, and their houses are inhabited by newcomers. It is the kind of town that can help a nouveau riche family such as the Reardons to believe that it has roots. We can see the town clearly enough and even make a guess at the identity of the place Knowles has in mind.

At first he seems to be doing rather well with the Reardons, too. He describes their huge house, High Farms, with its haphazard enlargements and incongruous adornments and innumerable servants. But the more he tells us about the Reardons, the less we understand them. In the end about all he has to report concerning the rich is that, as Hemingway said to Fitzgerald a long time ago, they have more money than the rest of us. It does seem to me that the Reardons aren't very bright, but that is true of a lot of people who aren't rich.

In any case the only Reardon who particularly concerns us is Neil, who is somewhat more comprehensible than his parents. He has recently married a girl of proletarian tastes, as he puts it, and at the moment he is satisfied with her because she is pregnant and is, he is sure, about to bear him a son. The girl, Georgia, is somewhat interesting, and so are her parents, who appear in the latter part of the story. But I find it hard to believe that Neil would have married such a girl as Georgia. In fact, Neil puzzles me in many ways. For the sake of his political career he advocates a welfare state, but, it seems clear to Cleet at any rate, he doesn't believe what he is saying and writing. The idea of a millionaire demagogue might have been worth developing, but Knowles does little with it.

What Knowles does work at is the relationship between Neil and Cleet, which is a little like the relationship between Gene and Finney in A Separate Peace. Through their boyhood Neil "had no friends except his peculiar, unlettered, shrewd, erratic, dreaming, lifelong pal, Cleet." Like Finney, Cleet is a spontaneous person, a true individual, and that is why Neil looks up to him but at the same time has to try to dominate him.

I can understand after a fashion what Neil sees in Cleet, but I cannot understand why Cleet is attracted to Neil. In fact, Cleet is a mystery whatever way I look at him. In the passage I have quoted, Knowles speaks of Cleet as "one who has had to come down in the world." But coming down doesn't seem to me the point at all. Cleet is simply an old-fashioned rugged individualist who finds himself out of place in the modern world. (p. 23)

Much is also made of another trait that may or may not be part of Cleet's Indian heritage: "When it came to understanding people he had a peculiar kind of talent." Something of the sort is said three or four times, and I suppose Knowles believes it's true; whereas the story seems to me to demonstrate that all along Cleet has been mistaken in his judgments of the Reardons, especially Neil.

I assume that Indian Summer is intended to be light fiction—vacation reading, so-called—but I found it heavy going. Having just read two novels that in different ways make tremendous demands on the reader—John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy … and Bernard Malamud's The Fixer,… I may have less patience than usual with books such as Knowles's. Both Barth and Malamud have made imaginative efforts of the highest order, and if they ask a lot from the reader, they give a lot. Indian Summer, on the other hand, seems something that Knowles just tossed off—and might better have tossed away. (p. 24)