Summer

Summer marks the Garp family’s convalescence at Dog’s Head Harbor: a period when care, guarded routines, and the return to writing take shape around the aftermath of the Buick–Volvo collision. The season turns Jenny’s long nursing experience into practical family care and gives Garp a way to approach his trauma through fiction.

Setting and Recovery

At Jenny Fields’ suggestion, the family moved into her estate at Dog’s Head Harbor, where there were enough rooms for her to look after them. Jenny’s nursing resumed in a domestic setting; the sea’s steady sound became part of the atmosphere of recovery. Duncan would associate it for the rest of his life with this period.

As summer visitors arrived, the family adjusted their routines to the crowded season. They exercised on the beach or in the sea only in the early morning, then watched the world from the shaded porches or withdrew into the large, cool house during the busier hours. Their seclusion was not simply a preference for privacy: it shaped how the injured family could occupy a place becoming more populated around them.

Jenny’s Care for Duncan

Jenny’s care included confronting the injury that Duncan’s parents could not bear to look at. She removed his bandage and helped him see his first glass eye. In practical, affectionate terms, she told him to let girls see his intact left eye first, while acknowledging that the advice was not particularly feminist. The moment brings her two identities together: she is a feminist figure, but insists that she is first and foremost a nurse.

The collision had left Duncan without his right eye, and he was instructed not to strain his remaining sight. Jenny’s steady attention to his wound contrasted with his parents’ difficulty facing it. In that contrast, the family’s recovery depended not only on time but also on the different kinds of care its members could offer.

Garp Returns to Writing

Garp’s recovery proceeded gradually. He began with long plot outlines and speculation about characters, avoiding the husband, wife, and child he initially thought were central to the novel. Instead, he worked through a detective, an outsider to the family. The distance offered by the police inspector let him approach the terror at the heart of the book without beginning directly from his own immediate anxiety.

As Duncan’s bandages came off and he began wearing a black patch, Garp moved closer to the material he had been avoiding and began a novel. In late summer, that work became The World According to Bensenhaver. His return to writing was therefore neither a clean escape from what had happened nor a simple account of it: he approached his personal fears through an invented character, then drew nearer to the painful subject itself.

A Season of Contrasting Outcomes

Summer holds recovery and continued harm side by side. Garp began to improve and write again, while the account of his novel’s beginning also notes that Michael Milton had been released from hospital after a further operation. Garp did not know of Milton’s condition, and the narrative does not present it as a source of comfort to him.

The season’s significance lies in this unevenness. At Dog’s Head Harbor, the family found shelter and Jenny’s skilled care, but convalescence did not erase the collision or restore what had been lost. The guarded household routines and Garp’s cautious return to writing show two responses to that aftermath: limiting exposure to the world outside, and trying to give traumatic experience a form.