"The Summer Before the Dark" is a 1973 novel by British/Southern African writer Doris Lessing, detailing one summer in the life of Kate Brown, a middle aged, middle-class woman who leaves a stable but satisfying life for a summer of travel, adultery and slumming. My edition is just under 250 pages, and it is told in mostly naturalistic prose.
The basic structure of the plot is episodic. With her home an empty nest after her children have all moved out, and her husband, a doctor, going to a conference, she gets a job as a translator from the Portuguese for an international food production organization, and spends the summer jetting around Europe with wealthy people from around the world. (And unlike many of the intertrashionalists I know, she actually has the self-awareness to realize how privileged she is). After this, she decides to have an affair with a younger man she meets at the conference, and together they travel to Francoist Spain, where their incipient affair is quickly cut short by a mysterious illness, where her partner ends up sick, being treated in a rural convent. Feeling herself becoming sick, she returns to London, where she stays at a hotel in delirium, and then rents a room in a house with some younger people. At the end of the book, she returns to her home.
Oh, and throughout the book, she has a recurring dream about trying to rescue a stranded seal.
In general, things in this book seem pretty standard. Middle aged woman with an empty nest has a midlife crisis and spends a summer outside of her comfort zone? Some time ago, I came to the conclusion that the core of literary fiction is finding meaning in a world that provides for most of our basic needs. So is this book another example of that?
Why this book succeeds to me is that it does show the actual cracks in that middle class life, through objective means, and that these objective threats manage to make the underlying psychological and spiritual crises more real. The pivotal part of the book takes place in a Spain that is a poor and repressed country, and the risk of being discovered as an adulterous couple is presented as a real risk. The sickness, and the ensuing delirium that follows, manage to perfectly set the right tone for questioning reality--without turning the novel totally surrealistic. Interestingly enough, several years after this, Doris Lessing did write several books of science-fiction and fantasy, so some of the more surrealistic parts of this book, such as the dream sequences, could be seen as precursors to other things.
So in summary, I think this book perfectly does what few books of its type do---it manages to take the basic idea of socially realistic, literary fiction and communicate the real sense of the liminal that can be both a threat and promise to everyday life.