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Whenever I read Elizabeth Taylor, I am struck by how her books are about nothing. They are about the mundane, everyday lives, of everyday people. And, then, suddenly you realize they are about everything–for they are about human interaction, love, loss, deception, self-deception–all the things that make up our own everyday existences.

When we first meet Harriet and Vesey, they are eighteen years old, with the rushing hormones and confused feelings that are easy to recognize in that age, if you have been there. They play hide and seek with the younger children and slip away into barn lofts, where they are timid and uncertain with one another; they share a first kiss; they try on adult feelings and do not know what to do with them. When they part company, there is too much unfinished business and imagination in the spent summer, and you can feel that this will be a summer that influences lives.

Harriet soon meets and marries another man, Charles, who has suffered his own heartbreaking rejection. When he discovers she has mementos of Vesey, he latches onto that and allows it to breed a jealousy in his heart. He imagines her always loving another man. She imagines what life with Vesey might have been, versus the reality of life with Charles.

“For it was Vesey who had undermined their life together, the idea of him in both their heads.�

Needless to say, Vesey re-enters the picture and what transpires is what makes this book so poignant. There is a daughter to Harriet and Charles, a sixteen year old, who also figures into the equation, and the misunderstanding, miscalculations, and utter confusion are so realistic they make you wonder if any one of these people knows the least thing about one another or even about themselves.

“Our feelings about people change as we grow up; but if we are left with an idea instead of a person, perhaps that never changes. After every mistake Charles made, I suppose you thought ‘Vesey wouldn’t have done that.� But an idea can’t ever make mistakes. He led a perfect life in your brain.�

I love Taylor’s penchant for understatement and her ability to weave a tale that seems at times to be going nowhere specific, when she has, in fact, a very specific destination in mind at all times. I did not find any of these characters overly likable, but I found all of them exceedingly real and truly pitiable. Taylor seems to say that we are all struggling for happiness and fulfillment, but we are so flawed, along with the others around us, that we can never recognize it when we find it, nor can we ever hold on to it for long.

I would probably give Elizabeth Taylor the “least appreciated great author� award. At the very least, I know she would be in the running.