51 pages • 1-hour read
The Summer Guests
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Symbols & Motifs
Birds and Birdwatching
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
The Summer Guests uses a motif of birds to represent the specific geography and environment where the novel is set: small-town Maine. The importance of birds is further emphasized in the surname of the protagonist herself, Maggie Bird. The Martini Club, and especially Maggie, have taken up the pastime of birdwatching, representing their close observation of their new environment but also how they have changed as they have aged.
When the Martini Club first appears in this novel, they are birdwatching. They have gathered to discuss The Genius of Birds, a 2016 book by science writer Jennifer Ackerman that covers birds’ astonishing intelligence. Birdwatching is a pastime that requires patience, close observational skills, and binoculars. These are all tools that the Martini Club will use to solve the mystery of Zoe’s disappearance and the identity of the bones in the pond. Indeed, the hobby and the investigation often propel one another forward. For instance, Declan locates Zoe’s goggles hanging from a tree while listening for birds: “I thought I heard an eastern towhee singing up there. I looked up, and instead of a bird, I saw that [the goggles] dangling on the branch” (198). Maggie likewise notes that “bird-watching’s an excellent cover for surveillance” (9), indicating that she intentionally uses it to pursue her investigation.
The novel portrays bird-watching as a pastime popular with older people and retirees, like the Martini Club. For them, it takes on particular resonance, as it requires many of the same skills they used as CIA agents. As Maggie reflects, “What was it about growing older that turned you into a bird-watcher and made you invest in expensive optical equipment? In their earlier lives they’d trained their attention on dangerous members of their own species; now they focused on species with beaks and feathers” (90). The group members’ feelings about this transformation are mixed. Although Maggie finds it pleasurable, Ben is “not much of an avian fan” (8). These mixed emotions illustrate how the group views aging as a mixed bag.
Summer Guests
The title of the novel indicates the importance of the motif of summer tourists. The motif is closely connected to the theme of Tensions Between Upper and Lower Classes. There are two sets of relationships touched by this motif: first, the relationship between the Conovers, Arthur Fox, and the Greenes and locals like the Tarkin family, and second, the relationship between Ethan and Susan Conover and the rest of the Conover family.
The locals refer to the tourists who come to Purity every year alternatively as the “summer guests,” “summer visitors,” or “summer people.” There is tension between the locals and these wealthy visitors, as the summer guests rely on the labor of the locals and the locals rely on the tourist revenue to sustain them during the cold winter months. The feud between Reuben Tarkin and the Conovers encapsulates this feud. Reuben resents that the actions of the summer guests led to the death of his father. He tells Jo, “Nothing’s ever their fault. It’s always us, always the locals who get blamed. We’re the reason those pretty houses are still standing” (167). He is relieved when, at the end of the novel, “the summer people” leave (323).
In a narrower sense, Ethan Conover tells his wife, Susan, that he feels like “just a summer guest” in his family’s summer cottage (21). Susan also feels like she does not belong within the fold of the wealthy, entitled Conover family. She tells Jo that the family is “polite enough […] but it all comes out as…forced […] Zoe’s not really one of them. Not a blood Conover. Just like I’m not” (224). Just like the tourists do not really “belong” in the town of Purity, Maine, Ethan, Susan, and Zoe do not really “belong” at Moonview cottage with the other Conovers.
Maiden Pond
Maiden Pond is a symbol of the Difference Between Appearances and Reality. Maiden Pond appears beautiful on the surface: Susan notes that it is “as flat as glass, its surface undisturbed by a single ripple” (17). Despite this tranquil appearance, under the surface tragic secrets lurk, represented by the skeleton of Anna, the nanny. The tragic events of the novel are foreshadowed in the second chapter when Ethan Conover explains the origin of the pond’s name to Zoe: “It’s called Maiden Pond because some girl drowned there ages ago” (12). This association with the tragic death of a young woman prefigures Zoe’s discovery of the skeletal remains of Anna at the bottom of Maiden Pond. Toward the end of the novel, Jo summarizes the meaning of Maiden Pond as a symbol when she reflects that Maiden Pond is “such a modest little body of water […] yet tragedy kept finding its way to that pond, like light sucked into a black hole […] A place where bad things happened. Where they kept happening” (264).
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