The Night Of The Moonbow – Thomas Tryon, 1989 ★★★★

The Other Side of Summer

Adolescent summertimes frequently are the stuff for gentle nostalgia. Thomas Tryon’s The Night Of The Moonbow goes for a different effect. 

In this tale about a 14-year-old orphan who struggles to make a good impression at a Connecticut sleepaway camp in 1938, Tryon presents a chilling suspense story in the guise of a rustic coming-of-age experience at a lakeside paradise.

Leo Joaquim makes for an odd fit when he arrives at Camp Friend-Indeed. Instead of playing baseball, Leo plays the violin. A murky backstory involving the sudden deaths of his mother and stepfather triggers outbursts and nightmares. This doesn’t go down well with most of the boys with whom Leo shares a cabin named Jeremiah, nor does it please the cabin’s demanding counselor, Reece Hartsig:

What the Jeremians needed was a boy who would add to their cabin’s luster – a boy who could take over as shortstop for the Red Sox and swim a good Australian crawl, and do all the things a good camper could do – not some orphan who played the violin and needed a nursemaid.

That’s the situation as channeled through Tiger Abernathy, Jeremiah’s star athlete who is more willing than others to give poor Leo a chance. But even Tiger has his limits.

If you know Tryon’s earlier, more famous novels, you will notice something familiar in The Night Of The Moonbow. Like his smash debut novel The Other and his later novel Lady, Tryon takes us back to Connecticut around the time of the Great Depression, the where and when of Tryon’s own coming of age. If you learn anything from reading The Other, it’s that carefree boys can make dangerous company, a message which figures here, too.

The camp motto, “Glad Men from Happy Boys,” takes on ironic import as our story progresses. Leo’s sad situation coming into Camp Friend-Indeed evokes little commiseration; the Jeremians are more focused on winning the annual camp trophy, named after Hartsig’s rich father, a camp benefactor. After his first night at camp ends with him crying out from a bad dream, Leo gets an unwelcome nickname, “Wacko,” and a reputation as an albatross that quickly spreads across the camp.

Phil Dodge, Jeremiah’s cabin monitor and self-appointed drill sergeant, lays out the case against to Leo directly: “Jeez, don’t you get it, Wacko? We want to win around here – that’s what it’s all about. Reece wants that cup. It’s his last year at Moonbow, we have to get it for him. If we don’t – well, whoever screws up, that’s his lookout.”

Tryon employs some cardboard characterizations and isn’t above the occasional dramatic excess or contrivance, but his heart is in the right place and he spins a magnificently immersive yarn. If you suffered from any kind of persecution complex growing up, you will find a lot to relate to in Leo’s situation.

Tryon drew upon his own boyhood summers at Camp Woodstock, in Woodstock, Connecticut. The camp’s website even promotes this link. On the one hand, it might seem strange after reading Night Of The Moonbow to think a venerable institution like Camp Woodstock would actually want credit for its inspiration, yet Camp Friend-Indeed as described by Tryon is a beautiful place where one can easily imagine wanting to belong. Leo certainly does, and Tryon makes us feel this both with his highly descriptive prose as well as a lovely map drawn by the author, which appears on the end papers of the hardcover first edition and details all the major landmarks that figure in the novel.

At an introductory campfire, Tryon sets the stage: 

From where did it spring, this sudden sense of belonging? From feeling the pressure of Tiger’s knee signifying the importance of a moment here or there? Or the mute, mirthful heave of the Bomber’s girth? From the fire’s friendly glow, the fresh, outdoorsy fragrance of the pines? Leo couldn’t tell. All he knew was that the good fellowship that suffused the gathering, knitting it together in mood and purpose, was enveloping him as well, filling him with eagerness and resolution.

The Council Ring at Camp Friend-Indeed is the setting for Leo's introductory campfire as well as other later events that figure in The Night Of The Moonbow. The Council Ring may have been based on this venue at Connecticut's Camp Woodstock, where the book's author was a camper in the 1930s. [Image from www.campwoodstock.org]

But the campfire proves a disappointment for Leo, when he spies Reece dressed up as an Indian warrior doling out prizes to other campers and irrationally hopes he might win one, too. Reece’s eyes as they meet Leo’s are cold and hard, a foreshadowing of trouble to come.

Yes, Friend-Indeed is a lovely locale, but there’s an ominous quality to the place even at rest:

By siesta time, after lunch, the waterfront lay tranquil and serene, the lake lapping the shore with its meekest touch, boats docked, canoes beached in squads, the punishment paddle hung on its hook. It was as if the camp could stand only so much of violent activity, of clamorous voices and hypertense confusion, before it must retreat again into order and serenity, to catch its breath before the next upheaval should occur.

Leo gets a taste of the punishment paddle, as well as other instruments of institutional cruelty less openly wielded. Reece is developed into an adversary of striking energy, cutting quite the figure around camp with his smooth surface charm and his authority with campers and camp staff alike. “Like an illustration out of American Boy” is how Tryon describes him, but Reece’s win-at-any-price ethic is flawed even within the narrow confines by which he lives. As Leo scores “happy points” towards his cabin’s victory, collecting spiders and playing his violin, Reece still grumbles because the camper isn’t doing things Reece’s way.

All this could be a bit of a torture test for a reader. We are made to care for Leo, yet we keep seeing him fall afoul of the way things are, singled out as a “spud” and “just not our kind.” But Tryon’s background as a horror suspense writer comes into play to keep things tense and the reader a worried observer of Leo’s plight. Mysteries like the fate of a former camper who occupied Leo’s bunk are developed and worked into the narrative. Leo’s damaged goods, but also smart, turning the tables on his adversaries more than once and proving himself to those willing to be won over.

I identified with Leo, which probably makes me a less neutral critic of this book than I should be. I went to a Connecticut sleepaway camp, too, and had a hard time of it. Like Leo, I wasn’t very athletic, and found myself sticking out in a bad way among my peers however much I strived not to be noticed. Like Leo, some of my traumas were self-inflicted, while others were not. I was perceptive enough to see Camp Wonposet as a noble place inhabited mostly by decent people. But like Leo, I couldn’t find the key to the door inside.

Social alienation is a powerful theme in fiction: Think Kafka and Ibsen for starters. The Night Of The Moonbow doesn’t rise to that level, perhaps; it’s a work of popular fiction written with younger readers in mind. But as the pieces come into place, and Leo struggles both with his problems at camp and his growing awareness of what really happened to his mother, you can’t help but feel for the character’s plight in an oddly personal way.

Funny thing about Tryon: His own experience at Woodstock might not have been anything like Leo Joaquim’s. I once knew an older man named Fred Sibley who went to Woodstock with Tryon, and even saw himself in one of the book’s secondary characters, a tagalong youngster named Peewee Oliphant. Sibley told me Tryon was popular and something of a Woodstock star, no doubt like Leo excelling at the talent competition: Tryon would go on to become a leading man in Hollywood for decades before jumping careers to become a bestselling novelist. Camp Woodstock’s website notes Tryon’s in-camp popularity, too.

But there must have been some darkness around the edges of his Woodstock experience that gave Tryon the sensibility to evoke a total outsider like Leo. Perhaps it was nothing more than being able to remember what it was like being young, and feeling at odds with one’s environment. Tryon’s ability for drawing this out makes for one of Night Of The Moonbow’s most heart-rending takeaways.

Of course, being a suspense novel, it needs dramatic tension to keep you engaged. The Night Of The Moonbow has that, maybe too much of it in places. Every chapter details some ugly experience Leo undergoes, whether it’s being forced up a lake-float ladder despite his acrophobia, or an ill-advised moment when he lays his hands on a prize camp artifact when he thinks no one else is looking. There’s a strain of dark comedy in the way Leo keeps messing up, even when he strives to make a good impression and help his cabin. Instead of being appreciated, or more gently set straight, he is accused of “grandstanding” by Reece and subject to silent treatments, and worse, feeding a deepening sense of paranoia Tryon effectively shares with the reader:

And now, everywhere he went around camp, it seemed, he caught “looks,” observed silent but meaningful exchanges, heard stealthy whispers, glimpsed tight little granny knots of conspirators in conference, knots that quickly untied themselves at his approach.

Like I said before, I’m not in love with everything Tryon does in this book. There’s a subplot involving Nazi sympathizers and a Jewish refugee which makes all the right points but feels labored, even if it is true to the time. You have all the tension you need already in Leo’s situation, without bringing global politics into the mix.

What is great about Night Of The Moonbow is Tryon’s evocative way with words, his ability to draw you in with sudden bursts of action as well as quiet ruminations about a long-gone summer and a lifestyle that seems so real even if it is now so far away. There’s a description Tryon gives of music heard from across a lakefront that captures in its mood as well as its fineness of language why this book casts such a strong spell for me:

There was a curious thing about music heard across water, an indefinable something that altered the tonal qualities of the notes, not subtracting but adding to their sum, rounding and hollowing them, making them both remote and somehow more intimate, like the warming gleam of a familiar but faraway star. And in years to come, whenever he might hear that song, no matter where he was or what he was doing, for Leo Joaquim it would always be the summer of ‘38, his Moonbow summer.