The Catherine Wheel by Jean Stafford

With his announcement to Cousin Katharine, it had reached a fever pitch, hotter and hotter until there was in his very heartbeat a voice that constantly said, "Charles Smithwick, die."  And the worst of it was that he did not care any longer whether Charles Smithwick lived or died or became the President; he wanted only to be free, to be able to read Mark Twain and play poker with Honor and Harriet and have a little fun, for pete's sake, but the voice would not let him be.  It was an undertone when he was with other people, but when he was alone, it was a roar and he had come to think that if Charles didn't die, this would go on for the rest of his life.

School has ended and Andrew Shipley has returned to the small Maine town where his mother's cousin Katharine lives in a stately manor.  He has been looking forward to seeing his cousin, but mostly to seeing his friend Victor, a strange and ugly boy whose friendship is the best thing in Andrew's life.  But the very day he arrives, he learns that Victor's brother Charles is home from the army, and sick: Victor, who idolizes his brother, will be too sick to spend time with him.  Andrew passes the summer in boredom and near-violent resentment; inside him, a voice--the kind of voice that only children, who have not lost the belief that their thoughts can have a physical effect in the world--commands Charles to die.

Meanwhile, Cousin Katharine, a beautiful and eccentric spinster, has her own inner turmoil.  Andrew's father John, who long ago chose their friend Maeve (Andrew's mother) over her, has changed his mind after decades of unhappy marriage.  Katharine knows that her love won't solve John's existential misery, but the lost past tortures her.  She plans a big party that reenacts the moment she realized that John was in love with Maeve, a party with big fireworks.  The Catherine wheel--that's a firework--becomes a symbol of the vanishing summer, the fleeting happiness that both Katharine and Andrew wish they could recover:

A crimson girandole mounted with a hiss to the sky and fell, a fountain of blinding orange fire; the fine, showering colors were unreal and chemical, plangent pinks and purples, sharp blues and violent greens, and the rapidity with which the rockets vanished, leaving for only an instant afterward the image of their course and the echo of their explosion, so excited her that she had been lightheaded and tears had started to her eyes.  As the last Catherine wheel revolved insanely on its separate planes of scarlet and green, sizzling and thundering as the wild spokes fired each other, Katharine, in ecstasy, turned to face John Shipley.  No longer than it took the Catherine wheel to spin itself to nothing and leave the summer sky to the stars did it take her to see that he could not, could never see her.

All the drama in The Catherine Wheel is purely psychological.  Andrew and Katharine's preoccupations become obsessions, useless and painful, but neither of them can let go, and each becomes convinced that the other knows exactly what's going on in their heads: Andrew childishly, and Katharine because she believes that Andrew has read her diary.  (Isn't that a recognizable truth: how often we worry that the shameful things we are thinking are readable on our face?)

The Catherine Wheel moves the action from wild Colorado to genteel Maine, but the novel works on the same formula as The Mountain Lion.  In both novels, Stafford reveals a canny ability to capture the strange mental universe of children, which seems as real as any physical thing.  And like The Mountain Lion, The Catherine Wheel is all mind-drama until it isn't, hurtling toward a final brief moment where the psychological really does manifest itself in the world in a flash of horrific violence.  But whereas the end of The Mountain Lion felt inevitable and terrible, the end of The Catherine Wheel felt gratuitous to me.  It was all out of proportion, I thought, to the more painstaking grief of lost summer happiness that is the novel's topic otherwise.

On a macro level, I'm not sure The Catherine Wheel worked for me. But man, can Jean Stafford write a sentence.  In the context of Northeastern gentility her prose loses something of the Western sparseness present in The Mountain Lion; these sentences bloom like flowering vines.  Here you can really see the influence, I think, of D. H. Lawrence (maybe the best sentence writer in 20th century English).  Stafford is a master of the specific detail--whole lives get crammed into sentences and phrases with stunning realness--and a skilled articulator of mental states: "his loneliness," she says of Andrew, "stayed like a bone in his heart."  You leave the book feeling scorched, singed, as if by fireworks.