Jillian Luft’s Modern Romance
Reviews
By Shy Watson
Scumbag Summer opens with photographs. The first image shows two severed cigarettes in an ashtray followed by the lit sign for a sports bar called “Body Talk.” The third image succeeds an impressive array of blurbs. It is a faded version of the book’s cover—an amusement park with palm trees in the foreground. In this way Jillian Luft sets the scene: early 2000s; Orlando, Florida.
Luft’s debut is divided by time stamps: “June,” “July,” “August,” and “the fall.” Each section contains titled chapters, usually pop culture references: “Freddy vs. Jason,” “Under the Eyes of Michael Jordan,” and “Straight Edge Vegan from Match.com,” to name a few.
Scumbag Summer is a love story between the girl and the man your parents warned you about. We start with summer and a fling. We meet the chapter-titular straight edge vegan, an overly sanitary man who’s still grieving his ex. From the get-go, we know it won’t work. Our unnamed protagonist pisses in the shower. She loves hot wings and PDA. But, as soon as our protagonist finds work, it doesn’t matter. First her nose, and then her eyes, are set on the “you” who is her boss at the call center.
It starts with instant messages. It’s an online romance, unfolding between two computer-bound telemarketers, under the fluorescent lights of a west Orlando business plaza. Yes, he’s married. Yes, the protagonist knows. Yes, it all spins out of control.
Then there’s the father element. As a child, our protagonist was abandoned with an ill, pill-addicted mom, but now her father is the only parent she has left. Awkwardly, they stumble toward a relationship. Our protagonist can’t stand watching him “strain his middle-aged body on the Soloflex knockoff he’s set up in the middle of [our] dining room.” But still, she seeks proximity, regardless of the grace it requires. And he’s trying.
The boss’s family is no better. On a trip to New Hampshire, our narrator is gutted by the way they regard her: not at all. The family drinks while our narrator “sit[s] like a rag doll,” feeling ashamed. The town is too small, its residents judgmental. The boss’s sister-in-law is jealous of their love. She takes it out on her husband, which does not end well. Our protagonist, by merely existing, has made a terrible mistake.
If nothing else, Scumbag Summer is juicy. Like trash TV, but it isn’t trash. Each sentence is carefully crafted, clearly pored over. Short sentences, like “I want answers,” give it to us straight. Often, Luft is blunt, direct. But nothing about this novel is uniform. Her more poetic lines move breathlessly, hitting the brakes with full force when they stop. Each particular is steeped in feeling, showing off Luft’s flair for detail. Take for example: “To be fair, I didn’t consider what things would be like outside of motel rooms, vinyl booths in empty diners, rented apartments with no trace of the future or the past.” As readers, we are given a ticker tape of visceral images, followed by a sharp observation that hits like a punch in the gut.
Above all else, Luft is a poet. Think Lana Del Rey, Maggie Nelson. Of the protagonist’s first whiff of her beloved, Luft writes: “A scent so disarming, one whiff could flay me, raw and pink, open to infection. You smell like boy adventures gone stale yet sweet. Like mown lawns in autumn. Like Marlboro Lights, drugstore soap, and something medicinally pure.” The writing, throughout, is beautiful. It reads like a confession, a whispered secret from your smartest and coolest friend.
Shy Watson’s fiction appears in Fence, Southwest Review, Joyland, and elsewhere. She wrote Horror Vacui (House of Vlad, 2021) and “Jeff! Bess!” for the anthology Sad Happens (Simon & Schuster, 2023). She earned her MFA from the University of Montana and was a recent writer-in-residence at Monson Arts.
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