Iowans’ secret lives provide inspiration for Iowa author

In the spring of 2012, Dean Bakopoulos was having trouble sleeping.

'I would take long walks,” the author says in a phone interview. 'I remember seeing how many people were up in this little town of Grinnell, Iowa, at 2 a.m.”

He got to thinking about 'the secret lives of people who can't sleep,” and some of the people and things he saw factor into the opening scenes of 'Summerlong,” his newly released third novel.

The novel is set in Grinnell - 'It's almost a love letter to the place,” Bakopoulos explains - and is imbued with what the author calls the 'friendly stoicism” he has discovered since moving to Iowa in 2009.

'That stoicism is coupled with a tolerance we don't always get credit for,” he says. 'People look at their neighbors with more compassion than judgment generally.”

The characters in 'Summerlong” are in need of a little compassion. Claire and Don find their marriage unraveling while Charlie and a young woman called ABC each wrestle with grief. Sexual misadventures ensue, but kindness endures. Ruth, an elderly woman who might seem to be at the fringes of the story, is instead central to it. 'She's making more things happen than we believe maybe,” the author says.

Grief is a primary emotion in the book, and it comes from a particularly honest place. 'Summerland” is dedicated to Armando 'Mando” Montano, a student and friend of Bakopoulos' who was found dead in Mexico City shortly after his graduation from Grinnell College.

'The grief I felt over Mando was really channeled into ABC,” he says. Passages featuring ABC's longing for a lost lover are some of the most powerful in the novel. 'Suddenly her grief took over the book in a way that surprised me,” Bakopoulos says.

All of the book's characters desire change in their lives, but are also afraid of it.

'The characters in my book are looking for a way forward,” Bakopoulos says. 'They find, unexpectedly, that the world isn't judging them as harshly as they are judging themselves ... The Midwest is the kind of place where people don't like to lose control. Some of the book is about that resistance to chaos. We want things to be orderly, neat, and on the surface all put together.”

Sexual tension permeates 'Summerlong,” but Bakopoulos wasn't interested in a cliched portrayals of lust and infidelity.

'The ways we stray are much more nuanced, private, and weird,” he says. 'It was a challenge to figure out how to acknowledge that this is a big part of almost every human's life.”

Bakopoulos maintains that his characters are wholly fictional rather than composites or portraits of people he knows in Grinnell.