TO THE NEW OWNERS: A Memoir of Martha's Vineyard. By Madeleine Blais. Atlantic Monthly Press. 288 pages. $26.

It's the human face of Martha's Vineyard, not the place itself, that entices in Madeleine Blais' charming, elegiac account of summers spent on its shores.

Blais, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose In These Girls, Hope is a Miracle was a finalist for the National Book Award, married into a socially and politically prominent family that spent summers simply but well on the Vineyard. Sidestepping an unseemly Lament of the One Percent regarding the 2014 sale of the Katzenbachs' long-time island retreat, her account of that family's history (and the island's) lends the mystique of Martha's Vineyard a more grounded view.

The summer home on Thumb Point, built in 1976, rested in a setting of blue gold water on three sides but with no heat, no phone and no TV. Rebuilt in 1978 with a few more amenities, simplicity remained the watchword. For its generations of inhabitants and many guests, the lifestyle meant a steady diet of lassitude and self-direction raised to an art form. Not to say there weren't plenty of activities. After a few days you became a happy animal, scampering barefoot, feral, and fortified, writes the author, currently a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

After providing capsule personal histories of the principal players, all of whom lived by language and shared a passion for social justice, Blais recounts how she and her husband happened upon the happy idea of using old-style ship's log books to record their summers, the minute details and larger themes. There is some excellent writing here, but also some rather mundane material from the logs kept by family members throughout their years at the Point.

But Blais also engages the reader with peripheral stories of how Chappaquiddick and the movie Jaws initiated the transformation of the island from a well-kept secret into a celebrity playground, some of it gated and closed off, with a regrettable invasion of McMansions. The Old Vineyard now exists as a kind of misty-eyed platonic ideal of Kindly Year-Rounders and Grateful Summer Guests coexisting in perfect harmony with a minimum of traffic and a plenitude of just-caught fish.

In her memoir, augmented by recollections from her husband and other island denizens, the Vineyard remains endearingly quaint, though not without a measure of snob appeal, which Blais gamely dissects, along with the island hierarchy and its sometimes inexplicable codes of conduct. The island sometimes feels like a club with secret rules that no one appears all that eager to share.

She also explores the gradual process of racial integration on the Vineyard.

Like any seemingly idyllic place, there are troubles beneath the island's veneer, and a clear-cut difference between the outlooks of full-time vs. summer residents, much less the tourist hordes that arrive by ferry.

Apart from its compelling personal portraits, the book benefits from much gentle humor, a compensatory sweetness, and a touching coda. There are also resonant bits of wisdom, such as Blais' meditation on an evening party: I looked around that night and realized that at certain signal moments the people you gather and the place where they assemble can be in and of itself a work of art, as real as any painting in a museum.

And at least as sustaining.

Reviewer Bill Thompson is a freelance writer and editor based in Charleston.

See more here:

Review: 'To the New Owners' a meditation on the character of Martha's Vineyard - Charleston Post Courier