The Last Summer
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The Last Summer, by Hugh Fox, is a novel written originally in English.
Synopsis
A novel about a professor dying of cancer and trying to pack his erudition into his son, who prefers video games and Coca-Cola, by the acclaimed author of Leviathan: An Indian Ocean Whale Herd Journal and Shaman.
Summary
Hugh Fox is a professor of American Thought and Language, a specialist in pre-Columbian Amerindian religion and a prolific writer. He teaches at Michigan State University, does research in Latin America and publishes fiction and nonfiction with houses big and small. His early titles include Glyphs (Fat Frog Press, 1969), The Ecological Suicide Bus (Camels Coming, 1970), Paralytic Grandpa Dream Secretions (Morgan, 1971), The Gods of the Cataclysm (Harper's, 1976) and First Fire: Central and South American Indian Poetry (Doubleday, 1978).
Fox's more recent titles include the novel Leviathan: An Indian Ocean Whale Herd Journal (Carpenter, 1980), the novel Shaman (Permeable Press, 1993) and The Living Underground: The Prose Anthology (Whitson, 1994). Of The Gods of the Cataclysm, a study of plumed serpents, yogic yantras and Mayan hieroglyphs, Curt Johnson wrote that it "ought to be required reading for cultural historians of all disciplines." Of Leviathan, Library Journal found that "Fox's musings on man as the killer animal are often chilling." The Small Press Review called Shaman "quite simply a masterpiece... so original that it is hard to fit into any category." Fox is a contributing editor to numerous literary journals and was the editor of Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry.
Fox got the idea for The Last Summer when his ten-year-old son came to spend the summer with him in Michigan a few years ago and Fox broke his ankle in the first week. Rather than send the boy back to his mother in Kansas, Fox had a "walking cast" made and hobbled around with the boy for three months. Fox's lawyer friend, Jerry Beckwith, had died from lung cancer the year before, and Fox conceived the idea of turning the broken ankle into lung cancer and writing the story of a dying father spending his last summer with his youngest child. Before writing, Fox frequented the radiation department at the hospital where his wife, a pathologist, works. During the writing, he drew on his own medical background (four years before turning to literature) and his experience of sitting at the bedside of Jerry.
The diary technique is the same as used in Leviathan, a story of survival on the high ocean, also ending in disaster. "With this technique," says Fox, "the reader gets inside the head of the protagonist. It's the closest you can get to virtual reality on the printed page. I carried around a notebook the whole summer and wrote it as it happened. I have no mercy on the reader — or on myself."
Editions
- Grand Terrace, CA: Xenos Books. ISBN 1-879378-13-2 (paper), xix + 153 p.