America's summer, imagined.

ETERNAL SUMMER ISN'T for everybody. "Nobody here does anything," William Faulkner wrote to a friend during one of his stints in Los Angeles. "Nothing ever happens, and after a while a couple leaves fall off a tree, and then it'll be another year."

Hollywood wasn't Faulkner's kind of place-he kept sneaking back to Mississippi when he was supposed to be writing screenplays-so he can be forgiven for not noticing that Southern California does, in fact, have seasons. Summer in L.A. has a start and a finish, although true to the city's apocalyptic mythology, it ends not with the coming of cold but the arrival of fire. In autumn, the Santa Ana winds blow through the Chapparal corridors, drying out the hills and priming them for ignition. Joan Didion, in The White Album, wrote of her final summer in Malibu, a season of tranquility that ended with conflagration. The days got shorter. Her daughter's friend drowned. And then the flames came: "Horses caught fire and were shot on the beach, birds exploded in midair." Two hundred homes burned. Hers was spared but she left it anyway. "In any event it was no longer our house."

The idea of an endless summer is appealing, but the season has a power over us precisely because it is bounded. Summer ends, and much of the meaning we have invested in it comes from the troubling feeling that it is slipping away, or that we never quite got it in the first place. As Americans we like to think we invented summer-that it is something more than a gravitational tension, a product of a particular place on our planet's trajectory around the sun-and maybe we did. But we aren't very good at doing summer. We take fewer vacations than almost anyone else in the developed world (the freedom-hating French have a guaranteed five weeks), and while we have the clearest ideas of what summer should be, we have only the vaguest idea of how to achieve them. Summer is road trips, tan lines and working up the courage to ask out the girl in the cabin across the lake. It's the mesquite grill, the warm flicker of the tv, the report of the bat and the soft whump of the ball hitting leather.

But who has the time? Baseball games are long and expensive; we never make it to the park as often as we'd planned. Beach traffic is a hassle; we end up working weekends; we get home late and say we'll use the grill tomorrow or maybe the next night. The Earth continues its flight around the sun, eventually some leaves shake off a tree and the girl in the cabin goes back to school in the city.

Literature is created from such disappointments, out of our ideals and their failure to make the leap from expectation to reality. When they crash, as they inevitably do, they add to the fractured myths that compose our national voice. Flannery O'Connor once said the South produced great writers "because it lost," and America has produced great literature about summer because the summer is also both myth and lost cause, an idea more honorable than the Confederacy but no less powerful or unattainable. Think of Gatsby, that essential American who staked everything on one summer's possibility, and did so because he refused to believe in time. The past for Gatsby was never out of reach, and he spent his final summer trying to recapture another one long gone, convinced that he could make it all work out differently, that given one more chance he could make it all real. Not for him would summer simply pass into another year; this time it would last, this time the girl would stay, this time the parties that sprawled across the lawn would never end and the sun would wheel and stir forever in the rich blue sky.

He should've known better, of course, but who are we to judge? We all suffer the same amnesia. We imagine blue skies and forget that the summer sun is often angry and pale, that on many summer days we don't want to be outside. Summer for Gatsby didn't end with cavorting under the stars but with a car slamming into a woman on an oppressively humid day, and Gatsby himself shot to death near his pool. This is summer as malignant torpor. It is Don DeLillo's Manhattan, a steaming cauldron of asphalt and paranoia, or Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, sulfurous by day and moody at night. It is the shore towns-the Nantuckets, the Martha's Vineyards, the Hyannisports-where August brings with it a slackening of the wind. The waves collapse, the fish school quietly and don't feed, the legions of tourists take on a sluggish cadence, as though they themselves are moving underwater.

It is in times like these that summer is less what we'd like it to be and more the violent fever we fear it could become. Summer is when those who have been denied the American dream seem most attenuated to its absence, and most inclined to exact some measure of revenge. Watts in '65. Newark '67. Detroit. Burn baby burn. But events like these get the memory-hole treatment; they never quite make it into the dominant myth.

Our summer stories include the Ferris wheels and salt air, the smells of chlorine and suntan lotion. They neglect the crippling frustration of poverty, the desperate loneliness of those never invited to the beach parties and barbecues. Narratives are vehicles of exclusion, so when I say that this summer I will walk beneath the jacarandas trees with a beautiful girl, eat oysters in a clam shack with a swinging screen door and have a beer on my patio as night falls, I leave out the man in the walkup apartment near mine, who will sweat beneath his t-shirt while the ceiling fan turns and he wraps the package he will use to lure the woman whose body he will later dump in the river. And yet which of these stories is better? Did I get summer "right"? Did he get it wrong?

The best summer books are the ones that straddle this fence. They are part sunshine, part noir, part myth and part cruel life. My favorite is John Knowles' A Separate Peace, the story of boys at a New Hampshire prep school who in the early 1940s try to forget about World War II. They withdraw, in other words, from the world, and this seems to me the essence of our relationship with summer-we long for things to be as we imagine they once were: before wars and responsibilities, before awful events that came and hung over us and changed us forever. But we can't have back what we never had at all. Yesterday seems serene only because it is gone, and withdrawal from the world is a fantasy because the world is of our own making. A Separate Peace is not, after all, a happy book. It is a tragedy of mistrust. The boys make the war disappear but then make enemies of each other.

And so summer disappoints us because we disappoint ourselves. We create a past that never existed and use the present to chase it at the future's expense. We want the good times to last forever, not realizing that today's banality is tomorrow's nostalgia. We are Americans, and we stare forward, as in Gatsby's time, only to be "borne ceaselessly into the past." Our myths are contradictions. We yearn for peace and see enemies everywhere.