|
Weather
missing? Click here
 
 
|
The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
March 3 - March 9, 2005 Edition
Web
Comments
- Email Submissions
IN
PRINT
Home gets in your bones
March 3, 2005
"The
Big House" by George Howe Colt. Scribner, 2003. $14.
327 pages.
|
Martha’s
Vineyard and Cape Cod have been forever altered by wealthy city folk
who’ve raised vacation homes along the water on land that was
nearly worthless 150 years ago. The home of one of these families,
built on a scraggly peninsula that reaches into Buzzards Bay from
its eastern shore, is the focus of “The Big House,” by George
Howe Colt, the adult readers’ selection for this year’s
One Book, One Island program. In a subtitle, the book is billed as
“A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home,” but
this isn’t only about a building, of course, it’s also about
the lives of the people who lived there.
While Tracy Kidder’s fine 1985 book “House,” which
Colt credits for both information and inspiration, is about assembling
a new house, “The Big House” is about deconstructing the
impact of an existing house on the dozens of people who have considered
the building home for a short but formative period each summer since
it was erected.
Built by Edward Atkinson, the author’s great-grandfather, the
Big House was completed in 1903, a time when large shingle-style “cottages”
were springing up at many locations along the New England coast. The
summer colonization of the Cape shore between Bourne and Falmouth
took root in the last three decades of the 19th century, after the
Old Colony Railroad extended its tracks to Woods Hole. Suddenly, according
to Colt, “Entrepreneurs bought up pasture land, divided it into
lots, and built developments named for Indian tribes that had mostly
disappeared. They catered clambakes for Bostonians who came down on
specially chartered trains to view available parcels.” Sound
familiar?
Over the years, The Big House has been home to four generations of
Atkinsons and Colts. In the mid-1990s the family came to up against
the painful reality that it could no longer afford a summer home of
this size. But the idea of selling the place was almost as impossible
as the act of continuing to own it. As much sacred cow as it was white
elephant at that point, it was no simple matter to walk away from
a building that had meant so much to so many people. After all, writes
Colt, “The Big House is where I learned how to swim, play tennis,
sail. The Big House is where I first kissed a girl, first got drunk,
first experimented with drugs. My most vivid dreams and nightmares
are set here.”
The Big House was like one of those lumbering, rambling masses of
porches and windows and shingles that lean out over the edge of West
Chop. They command their surroundings with an almost presumptuous
air, the way old-money Boston Brahmins felt that they controlled most
of New England, even after their families had multiplied and divided
to the point that most of that old money has disappeared. “The
Boston area was full of families like ours, venerable tribes that
had nothing left to remind them of their former prominence but their
names which no longer counted for much and their ancestral summer
homes. Like most Boston Brahmin families — even those who lived
off their trust funds — we pretended that we cared nothing for
money and, furthermore, that those who did suffered from a kind of
character defect.”
For the reader, the invitation is to identify with the tribulations
of a family of well connected, if no longer wealthy, WASPs who are
forced to sell their summer house. The temptation is to dismiss them
as a bunch of irrelevant dinosaurs, but that’s too facile, it
seems to me: why are these people any less interesting, or less important,
than any other ethnic subset?
In the hands of a less deft writer, establishing interest in and empathy
for the lives of the Atkinson/Colts might be impossible. But George
Colt is no ordinary writer. We may not recall for long the name of
the Harvard hockey player who was spurned by the author’s great
aunt, and then went off to die in Normandy, but the power of the Big
House’s warm, forgiving embrace on all those who have lived in
it leaves a lasting impression.
Colt’s writing is compelling. He is able to catch a moment, a
feeling, with a delicate but deep touch. For most readers, identifying
with the mood, if not the specifics, of the following passage should
come easily. “The entire scene is so familiar, so langorous,
it seems to be playing in slow motion. It has changed little since
my youth, except for a generational shift that causes something like
vertigo. Instead of station wagons lined up in the sand behind the
beach, there are minivans and SUVs. Instead of my brothers and me
splashing in the shallow water, it’s my children. Instead of
my father and his friends, it’s my friends and I, hair thinning
and stomachs paunching, who stand with our arms folded, shifting the
sand back and forth with our feet, talking about someone’s new
boat, about how hot it must be up in Boston, about how time seems
to go faster the older you get.”
The Big House is a book you need to settle into, not one to scramble
through. As if you’d just arrived at a familiar, quiet place
for a long off-season weekend. or for a couple of weeks in mid-summer,
kick off your shoes and pull off your socks, so you can feel the sand
under your heels and the air between your toes, and drink this book
in. Give yourself the treat of unwinding into the mood and pace of
The Big House, and let George Colt share with you a family and personal
story that contains enough universal images and ideas to satisfy any
reader.
After all, The Big House is ultimately about home, something all of
us have a feel for. “Although I have spent only a month or two
here each year for four decades, I have always thought of it as home,
if home is the one place that will be in your bones forever.”
|
| Send
this page to a friend:
|
|
©The
Martha's Vineyard Times 2004 - www.mvtimes.com
|
| |
|
|
