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Leaving It All Behind
Letting the past go as far as possible
There’s a scene in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s latest novel, Long Island Compromise (Random House 2024), where a character nicknamed “Beamer” (and yes, much woe upon him) remembers his high school days, drinking and telling stories with friends, while some boys told of backseat conquests and some girls danced around the kitchen to Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.”
In the scene, Beamer keeps hearing the line “But I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun…” and when I read that last night, a memory, or maybe it was less than that and just a feeling, coursed through me. I was never a “boy of summer” like either Henley means or Beamer reflects on. In Henley’s story, those boys moved on, and he stayed. For Beamer, he moved on but never forgot those days, not because he’s nostalgic exactly, but more correctly, he was traumatized in ways the novel has mentioned and will continue fleshing out. To all outward glances, he has everything a man could want, proving that we know so little about anyone, even our good friends.
The song got stuck in Beamer’s head, and now it’s stuck in mine, which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if I liked it more, if I ever liked it at all, which I never really did. In 1984, when it was released, I had other things, other music on my mind, and “The Boys of Summer” felt…
