Throughout the book, one of my main frustrations with Angie was her seeming inability to just say what she was thinking— come on! I kept thinking, just spit it out! But it was in the beginning of the August section of the book that I was able to put together all of the pieces relating to her troubles with communication. That ongoing character theme is different than just a dated formulation of propriety and girlishness. Or, at least, is in addition to that.

August starts with an especially bad bout of Angie’s mother’s mysterious illness. She requires absolute silence in the house, and is completely accommodated— Kitty is sent to play outside, Angie rushes to pick up the telephone when it rings, even the noise of water hitting a pan is too loud. It’s very telling that this bout of enforced silence comes immediately after Jack’s confession of love and Angie’s lack of a response (“there was nothing I could say”). We see from it the ways in which Angie’s home life, which has required not just frequent isolation but also silence, has affected her. It’s no wonder, then, that over and over again Angie can never find the words to say (“You didn’t talk much” page 95, “I tried to keep my thoughts out of my words” pg 211, “It didn’t say what I meant” page 217, etc.).

The description of this first August day ends with an outpouring of speech from Lorraine (“She was only saying out loud the things that had been pounding in her head for days and days”), but a similar outpouring never comes from Angie. In the end, nothing in the book is enough to either make Angie confess her love, or even lack of it, to Jack. She promises herself that “someday I will tell him”, but we as readers will never find out if she does. What does this say of the evolution of her character? Does it mean that Seventeenth Summer has even less of a character arc than Catcher in the Rye?