TRESPASS

After a story collection (Silk, 1996), Mazur returns with her first novel, a lively comedy of cast-off conventions given wing in the wilds of southeastern Massachusetts.

Fifty-year-old Maggie, naked in her house one hot June afternoon after hubby Hugh has sailed off in his boat for a few days, discovers a strange man bathing in her basement. Does she call the cops? No—she scrubs his back, not bothering to clothe herself. Thus begins the incredible summer of Grenville, the man in the basement, who has moved in somewhere on Maggie’s property, formerly her grandmother’s farm, and begins to appear, usually hungry, whenever Hugh sails away. Maggie confides her growing obsession with this elusive but demanding presence (he reveals he’s a married man recently stepped out of his former life) to her cousin Jake, a mail-order minister living on family funds who inhabits the adjoining land, but her confession only puts Jake into a funk because for years he’s harbored his own secret yearning for her. When Maggie’s grown children and their families arrive for the annual summer vacation, the plot thickens: troubled-poet daughter Gillian discovers Grenville too. Maggie runs to seek counsel from her cousin after she accepts Grenville’s offer of an overnight sail, thereby only deepening Jake’s despair. But when Gillian comes over later, spilling her own story of nightly forest trysts with his nemesis and seeking advice, he goes over the edge and tumbles into her arms himself. Unfortunately, his longtime intermittent girlfriend Sally chooses just that moment to visit: and her response is also to find her way to Grenville. There’s more, but the high-water mark of the summer’s surging passions comes and goes, and as the waters of lust recede, Jake and Maggie somehow regain an even keel.

Crafted with a genteel wit and a landscape painter’s eye: a tale both titillating and charming. It deserves to grace many a beach chair this summer.