[A Thousand Summers] is a love story, told in reverie, by Freeman Osborn, a solitary Yankee, owner of the Edgartown Pharmacy on Martha's Vineyard…. Freeman's horizon was bounded by the Vineyard until that day in 1927 when an attractive woman entered his shop to have a cinder removed from her eye. He performed the operation deftly and with fateful consequence to them both.

Sheila is the wife of Thomas Van Anda, a stuffed shirt high up in the Foreign Service. She and Freeman discover a mutual attraction for Japan, where she had been stationed for three years and whose history and art he has absorbed at long range…. Their talk is bland, their snatched-at happiness undetected, and, to me, rather implausible.

When Freeman patents a successful insect repellent he can afford to leave the Vineyard on his pursuit of a future with Sheila. But by now his wife is...