Excerpt from BUG HOLLOW by Michelle Huneven
Fresh Water in the Sea
he was in Ojai checking out a boarding school for her younger son when a man near her said her name. “Yvette?” He had short, curly salt‑and‑pepper hair, a good tan, and kind brown eyes. Her body recognized him first: Phil Samuelson, fifteen years older. A person she’d never expected to see again.
Age had had its way with her as well, although her hair remained dark brown with only a few stray wires of white, and somehow (well, mostly by eating nothing) she was still slim, though with a tendency—and here is where age showed itself— to look fragile or, as her husband complained, skeletal.
“Is it really you?” she said, and, smiling, they embraced. “You’re not here for François,” he said. “Surely he’s, what . . .” “A freshman at UCLA. I saw him yesterday. No. I’m here for
my younger boy, JP. Jean Pierre.” “You and Claude got your two!”
“Yes. And you? Did you and”—here, somehow, from a deep drawer of memory, she extracted a name—“Sibyl—” She was about to say, “have another,” but just then, the guide called the group to order and led them into the main building, which looked like a Spanish mission with its belfry.
Swamped by memories and long‑ago feelings, Yvette worked to pay attention to the woman’s recitation of school policies. Whenever she turned Phil’s way, they smiled at each other, incredulous.
They toured classrooms; she’d read up on the architect, Austen Pierpont, who’d designed the auditorium with its all‑ glass back wall looking out on the Ojai Valley’s citrus groves and the dining hall with its glass windows framing another view of terraced hillsides and marrow‑colored mountains. The campus spanned several hundred acres; walking place to place gave them time for their present selves to eclipse their younger selves, so they became just who they were again, and familiar to each other.
The last time she’d heard from Phil was a note, thanking her for a condolence letter she’d sent after his son died. “It’s the worst thing to happen in my life,” he’d written.
Had she answered him? Probably. Probably with something inadequate, because what wouldn’t be?
Early November gave them a pulsing blue sky and a cool breeze snaking up from the ocean. In the stables, horses stamped in their stalls: Thacher assigned every freshman a horse, which was why JP wanted her to check it out. Phil touched her arm. “Are you rushing off?” he said. “Or can we have lunch some‑ where?”
She was staying at the Ojai Valley Inn—extravagant and ridiculously expensive, an indulgence—and didn’t know any other place to go. He agreed to meet her there, at the inn’s restaurant. Clutching their folders of application forms and school pamphlets, they walked together to the parking lot. “You’re not still
in Saudi?” he said.
“That hateful place! We’ve been all over the world since: Bangkok, Jakarta, Madrid. We’ve landed in Oaxaca—Claude’s retired.”
“I always wondered,” Phil said.
She knew what he wondered: if her marriage had lasted. Had his? So many marriages don’t survive the death of a child.
They reached her rental car first, and she sat in its sun‑ warmed interior for some minutes before turning the key.
She’d married Claude twenty‑two years ago against the advice of her older sister, Marie Claire, who’d said, “He’s too old!” (Yvette was twenty‑seven, Claude forty‑eight.) “He is not handsome,” Marie Claire had continued. “You’ll have ugly babies with his nose. Right now, you think you love him because he’s the big man at your job. But he’s stealing the last of your most beautiful years!”
Yvette had thought Claude quite handsome, in particular his nose, which was like a big wedge of granite, formidable and sexy. More to the point—and she couldn’t make this clear to Marie Claire—working with him was the most potent attractor. Here she was, fresh out of Yale architecture school, a mere intern at his firm, and he’d tapped her to do his lettering, and then to discuss and draft his ideas, and draft and draft and draft them until she was channeling—and shading, then revising— his vision. He roared his approval. He improved on her improvements and she on his. The clock hands spun; more than once they worked through till dawn, the floor covered with curls of flimsy. She could not quite convey this to Marie Claire, but working like that was as intimate as sex. No, more.
Marie Claire had come to Boston from Baltimore to meet Claude—there was an uncomfortable dinner at the Charles Hotel—and to give Yvette a wedding shower.
She’d booked a back room at a ladies’ lunch restaurant. Their mother, who was in Panama with her new husband, couldn’t come, but Yvette’s two friends from Claude’s firm did, along with former classmates from New York and New Haven, and her roommate from Emma Willard, her old boarding school. One of Claude’s two daughters showed up as well, nineteen‑year‑ old Nonie. (Twenty‑one‑year‑old Charlotte was at Bowdoin.)
Yvette had stipulated no household gifts because she and Claude were moving overseas. The women from the firm gave her naughty lingerie, which embarrassed her in front of Nonie, but Nonie laughed with everyone else at the fishnet, the nipple holes and crotch snaps. As soon as everyone left, Yvette wound all that obscene frippery into a ball and tossed it into the dumpster out back.
They married at the courthouse the next day, Marie Claire and Nonie their witnesses.
Marie Claire gave her a copy of Middlemarch, which, al‑ though heavy, Yvette took on the plane, a twenty‑four‑hour flight. She read it too, or enough to know why Marie Claire had given it to her.
But Claude was not at all like Mr. Casaubon; he was not a withered, celibate old bachelor pedant. Claude’s legs were strong and admirable. He’d been married before, for twenty years, and divorced for four. Her friends at his firm said he’d gone through some postdivorce craziness, sleeping with every woman he could. But then, they added, in laughing whispers, he’d done that in his marriage, too, so no big surprise, the divorce. “Watch out,” they’d told her when she was new. “Sex is Claude’s way of shaking hands.”
To Yvette, Claude was more like literature’s reformable rakes, a Mr. Rochester or Fred Vincy: a large man, a little overweight maybe, with faded red curls spilling over his forehead, a bowtie ever askew. Without a wife to tell him when to cut his hair or to tuck in his shirt, he was a shambles. A big, sexy shambles.
Reprinted courtesy of Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, Copyright © 2025 by Michelle Huneven
BUG HOLLOW by Michelle Huneven
A Novel
A decades-spanning family saga featuring the messy but loving Samuelson clan trying to make sense of the world after the loss of their son Ellis
When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.
From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband, Phil, had found respite in a love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high achieving middle Samuelson, comes home to try and make peace with her mother after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally has become the de facto caretaker to Eva, the child Ellis never knew.
Michelle Huneven is “known for five enthralling novels, which chronicle the lives of middle-class Americans in her lushly conjured native California, as her characters struggle with addiction, excruciating romances, and resounding losses as they continue to seek meaning and a way to be good” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). She captures the Samuelson clan with glorious precision and the deepest empathy as they fracture and rebuild again and again.
Saga | Fiction Literary [Penguin, On Sale: June 17, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book , ISBN: 9780593834879 / eISBN: 9780593834886]
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About Michelle Huneven
Michelle Huneven is the author of two previous novels, Round Rock and Jamesland. She has received a General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers and a Whiting Writers’ Award for fiction. She lives in Altadena, California.
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