The small town of Holton Mills, New Hampshire, in 1987 is the
setting for Joyce Maynard’s gentle and quietly moving
coming-of-age novel. In it, she tells the affecting tale of three
damaged people who come together to form an unlikely family.

Hours after an appendectomy, convict Frank Chambers leaps from
the second floor of a prison hospital and makes his escape. In
front of the magazine rack at the local Pricemart, the bleeding man
encounters 13-year-old Henry Johnson, the story’s narrator.
Improbably, Henry’s mother Adele agrees to take Frank home, a
decision that launches the three of them into a complex
relationship that will change their lives irrevocably.

Adele is one of those people so battered by life that her
response to its cruel blows is to retreat into an almost monastic
existence. Her ex-husband has started a new family with whom Henry
shares Saturday night dinner at the local Friendly’s
restaurant, an occasion that serves mostly to give him the chance
to compare himself unfavorably with his stepbrother, who’s
the same age. Adele, an accomplished dancer, fitfully sells
vitamins over the phone (giving them away to customers who
can’t afford them), listens to Joni Mitchell’s
Blue and Leonard Cohen, and fitfully tries to learn
Spanish and play the cello. She shares Cap’n Andy frozen fish
dinners with Henry while discoursing on an array of firmly held
opinions, from the proper way a man should hold his partner in
ballroom dancing to her view that microwave ovens cause cancer and
sterility.

Maynard’s empathy for this quirky woman is evident, but
she’s content to win us to that view at a measured pace, as
we gradually learn, through Henry’s eyes, the roots of
Adele’s sorrow and the reasons why, as he sadly concludes,
she “seemed to have taken herself out of the game,” how
her “goal was to be invisible, or as close as she could
get.”

The third member of this odd trio isn’t an ordinary
escaped prisoner, he’s a convicted murderer. But midway
through the novel, when Frank shares the story of his crime,
it’s impossible not to feel an insistent tug of sympathy.
Patiently, he works to win Henry’s trust, engaging him in a
game of catch, offering bits of fatherly wisdom as he performs odd
jobs around the house, and, in a scene that’s somewhere
between mouthwatering and erotic, sharing the secret to baking a
perfect peach pie. There’s an almost idyllic quality to this
portrait, in which, Henry recalls, “for the moment, time was
suspended, and not even atmosphere existed.” Maynard has an
unerring eye for the intricate dance of family life, and these
moments of simple domesticity are painted with accuracy and
feeling.

But the relationship between Adele and Frank soon takes on a
darker cast in Henry’s mind. The adults end up sharing
Adele’s bed, and Henry, who’s experiencing the first
flush of his own sexuality, hears their nightly couplings through
the wall of his bedroom. They begin to speak of leaving New
Hampshire and starting a new life in Prince Edward Island, and
Henry fears he’s about to be left behind. He struggles with
the notion that the only way to prevent her departure is to reveal
Frank’s presence to the police and destroy “the first
true piece of good luck in any of our lives in a long time,”
and his resolution of the conflict brings the story to a taut
climax.

What ultimately makes LABOR DAY such a delight is
Maynard’s pitch perfect rendition of the voice of her
narrator. Henry’s tangled feelings of love for his mother and
anguish at his inability to assuage her pain mingled with his
sexual awakening and the awkwardness of a boy poised on the brink
of manhood are rendered with tenderness and keen insight. The
novel’s resolution feels inevitable, but not predictable, and
the coda describing Henry’s life after that Labor Day weekend
enriches all that has preceded it. Henry, himself now a husband and
father, grants emotional absolution to the adults who shaped his
life and in doing so gives them a gift each has earned.

LABOR DAY is a wise, heartfelt novel that illuminates with
subtlety and grace quiet truths about the sometimes fractured
beauty of family life and the mysteries of the human heart.