Dean Bakopoulos's fiction doesn't stray far from his home base--his first novel, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon took place in his childhood home state, Michigan, and his second, My American Unhappiness, was set in Madison, Wis., where he earned his MFA. Summerlong unfolds during an unusually hot and humid Iowa summer in the college town of Grinnell where Bakopolous now teaches. Grinnell is an off-the-track burg in a no-nonsense state in the flyover central Midwest ("you could get stuck behind a tractor... [and] everyone would just be calm, as if it was perfectly okay to obstruct the productivity of the world in order to grow corn"). Nothing much happens here, but people somehow can't quite leave.
Twenty years previously, Don and Claire Lowry came for jobs at the college, but then they had two children, Claire never got around to writing a second novel, and Don drifted into real estate as the recession put their own house into foreclosure. When two former college students come back to Grinnell, the young bisexual Amelia Benitez-Coors ("ABC") enchants Don, and the West Coast actor Charlie Gulliver arouses Claire's dormant libido. As the temperature ratchets into the high 90s, the sexual tension rises along with it. Don and Claire half-heartedly resist the tempting infidelity, but the sultry tank-top and flip-flop weather tests their upright Midwestern resolve. At one point Don tells Claire, "I live in a goddamn Bruce Springsteen song." But Bakopoulos skirts potential clichés with the empathy and good-natured common sense of his solid Midwest setting--no matter how hot and sultry its summer weather may be. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.