"Labor Day" by Joyce Maynard (William Morrow)

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Labor Day
Joyce Maynard
240 pp. William Morrow. $25.99
Pub. Date: 7/28/2009
ISBN-13: 978-0061843402

Reviewed by Paul Stotts

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Remember Labor Day as a child. The proverbial final weekend of summer, the dying breath of three months of summer vacation. The end of lazy summer days spent playing, laughing, living. As dusk darkens the sky, you’re down to your final hours, depressed, antsy, scared; the coffin nails being driven into summer’s casket, the owls outside hooting a requiem. Like a condemned prisoner waiting to make his last walk, savoring his last moments. Because tomorrow you start a new school year. Tomorrow is a beginning, a new stage in your life, a transition. You’re an eighth grader now—practically grown. You’ve come so far, learned so much.

Labor Day is a time for transition, for moving on, for growing up. Out of the death of summer vacation, you are reborn, changed. It’s a new year, and it feels like it. Feels like it more than New Year’s Day, or your birthday. Never have you felt the change more. It’s the feeling of coming-of-age as a yearly ritual.

But it’s not the day itself which affects this momentous change; it’s the people in your life, the ones there everyday, making an impression, helping you grow up. It’s parents, and friends, and family. The role models. The solid foundation your life is built upon. But sometimes there’s someone else, a person who enters your life for a short period of time, and stirs your soul, changing you tremendously. Their influence on you burning white-hot, a self-identity supernova; it’s there, pulsating, scalding, forging, and then—suddenly—it disappears. Gone like a memory. Gone like the summer days, vanishing in autumn’s cooling breath. Leaving you to a new future, having now made you a better person.

Some novels are personal; they ring true, stir memories. Because aspects of the story are something you recognize from your own past, something you intimately lived. Parts of the book feel like a biography, reminding you of emotions and experiences that have been buried and forgotten. Labor Day by Joyce Maynard is this type of book for me. It’s a special kind of magic, a personal magic, a magic for my soul. A happy nostalgia, filled with warm thoughts, and the feeling of being loved. It feels like home.

Maynard’s characterization of Henry, the novel’s thirteen-year old protagonist, is uncanny. Understanding the mind of a teenage boy is difficult enough, understanding the mind of a teenage boy living alone with his single mother—and lacking a guiding male role model—is even harder. I’ve been where Henry’s at, lived it, and was stunned how accurately Maynard captured the feelings and emotions of the situation. The displacement, the isolation, the hunger for guidance, the deep love. All true, and real. And brilliantly realized.

Henry’s relationship with his mother, Adele, is incredibly tender and powerful, a revelation about the human experience, about the special relationship a mother has with her only son. A relationship Maynard captures perfectly. A relationship that made me appreciate my own mother more, appreciate everything she did for me, every time she struggled for me. It made me want to call and say “Thank you, Mom.”

Joyce Maynard’s Labor Day is one of those rare novels that resonates deeply, emotionally and spiritually. It makes you feel. Feel what it means to be human, the laughter, the tears, the struggle. To comprehend the entire human experience, an epiphany about one’s purpose. Evocative and powerful, Maynard masterfully explores feelings of isolation, displacement, loneliness and love. It’s beautiful and awe-inspiring—like watching a child being born—and completely unforgettable. A stunning achievement.

Final Grade: 93 out of 100