Summertime Blues

I have not read anything else written by Chris Knopf and am not familiar with his Sam Acquillo Hampton Mystery Series. This new novel, Elysiana, appears to be a departure for Knopf as it recounts a summer on the Jersey Shore in 1969. The main characters are Gwendalynn Anders who finds herself so stoned out of her mind that she somehows falls asleep in Michigan and ends up in New Jersey in Elysiana, the town whose name is also that of the novel. Gwendalynn eventually meets up with Jack Halcyon (I think Knopf chooses these names intentionally, but he doesn't really do much to show us how and why these names are important. Other characters include the ambitious and morally questionable Norman Harlan, the Borough Council president whose professional jealous leads him to think of taking out the mayor of Elysiana who stands in the way of Harlan having control of the town. Another antagonist for Harlan is Avery Volpe, the captain of the beach patrol. As you can imagine in a beach community, Volpe would have a certain standing in the community that relies on the beach for its livelihood.
There are numerous other characters who come in and out of the main narrative and who are connected admirably by Knopf's storytelling. The use of the beach patrol allows Knopf to create a cast of characters whose personalities would not normally interact, but do as members of the rather elite beach patrol.
Knopf brings his story to a climax by the presence of a rather destructive hurricane that is headed directly towards Elysiana. As the weather approaches, the various schemes, love triangles, and peculiar relationships tighten as well. Without spoiling the ending, the story has a series of what I think can be called "happy endings", but in several cases they are a bit too neatly resolved. The fate of several of the characters is rather incredible, though as a reader I felt myself glad to see these various endings. Still, I think that Knopf might have found a more sophisticated and believable manner of completing some of these stories.
I think Knopf is particularly good at drawing his characters and establishing relationships. However, I did feel that most of his female characters were quite traditional in their desires and life goals. Often they function as a form of sexual release for several of the characters even if there is not "sex" occurring between the men and women in the story. Here I feel that Knopf has fallen back into the generic trappings of mystery and detective novels that he is better known for. There is an elegiac tone in this book as the author takes us back to a perhaps more naive and hopeful time. It is a good read, though I think there is much in Knopf's fictional world that is underutilized.

Czar