Life can change forever over the course of just a few days. That’s the premise of “Labor Day,” which begins on the Thursday at the end of the summer of 1987.
Our 13-year-old narrator, Henry, is as much of a loner in his small New Hampshire town as his single mom, Adele. His father lives with a new wife and baby and their visits are relegated to awkward weekly dinners at a chain restaurant.
He’s a thoughtful kid, the kind of son who feels responsible for his mother’s happiness enough to give her a “Husband for a Day” coupon as a gift.
While making a rare trip to Pricemart, Henry’s perusal of a women’s magazine article (“What Women Wish Men Knew That They Don’t”) is interrupted by a mysterious stranger, Frank, who is bleeding as a result, he says, of falling out of a window.
Frank turns out to be a perfect stand-in father for Henry, capable of fixing a tile, throwing a baseball, and baking a perfect peach pie.
He’s even a love interest to Adele who, despite her dancer’s body, has refused to date, possessing, until now, a permanently broken heart. But Frank also turns out to be an escaped convict, the subject of a local manhunt.
The story is entirely told through Henry’s point of view, so the gravity of harboring a fugitive prisoner and how quickly Adele begins to fall for him, is something he only slowly comes to understand, making it reminiscent of both “About a Boy” and “Atonement.”
“I got this odd feeling, when I looked at her — and then at him. It was like some kind of electric current ran between the two of them,” Maynard writes.
The connection between Adele and Frank is just as difficult to understand for Henry as his own burgeoning sexuality.
He has his own love interest, Eleanor, a fellow outcast. She’s a Chicago transplant who is worldly — she knows about Patty Hearst and Oedipal complexes — and, ultimately, is more damaged than Henry.
While Labor Day has its fair share of romance, it’s really a story about the more complicated nature of love: the jealousy, betrayal, and risks we’re willing to take for it.
That long weekend at the end of the summer of ’87 is over too quickly, but, at the end of the story, when we meet an adult Henry, it shows how much those five days changed his life forever.
Labor Day
by Joyce Maynard
William Morrow