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Summer at the Lake is one of the Andrew M. Greeley novels where the priest-novelist leans heaviest into his autobiographical material: an Irish-Catholic Chicago summer-vacation milieu of the late 1950s, with a young man and a young woman whose relationship gets interrupted by family pressure and finds itself decades later in a position to be reconsidered.
Greeley's strengths are the Chicago Catholic-intellectual texture and the sociological-romantic register. The lake-vacation period detail is rendered with the affection of someone who actually was there. The contemporary reconstruction chapters that frame the historical material are slighter than the period work.
Three stars. Recommended to Greeley regulars and to readers interested in the specific 1950s Chicago Irish-Catholic social class that his career documented.
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