John Lane has done it again.
In his new collection of short stories (“Interval Ownership: New Tales From Edisto,” 2026, Mercer University Press, 171 pages) highlighting week-long vacations on Edisto Island on the coast of South Carolina at the Shearwater residency that operates on what is called an “interval ownership,” we get a new genre of fiction that is a kind of “beachfront bingo,” as he calls it, and at the same time is a kind of fictional memoir.
In this sense, and considering Lane’s supreme talents as a first-tier prose-writer, the Spartanburg, S.C., resident’s work reminds one of the writings of Chekhov, whom he quotes in the frontmatter of this book: “How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.” “Interval Ownership” is a classic and every bit as good, if different, from his previous two novels.
Lane has been visiting Edisto Island for some years on his annual vacation pilgrimage and has bought shares in a shared residency building where he has met and heard stories from other property investors from which he has created stories of diverse characters and their idiosyncrasies and obsessions. A collection of 13 individual stories of the people who share, at different times of the year, the same digs, yet in their own unique ways. So, these are stories about vacation with a twist that reads like a memoir and/or a high-profile sitcom.
The 13 stories in this book are a commentary on capitalism as much as they are mirrors of Freudian psychology. “The reader is confronted with philosophical, literary, environmental, ethical, even gustatory dilemmas. If you’ve dreamed of a vacation home, “Interval Ownership’ will make you reconsider,” writes George Singleton in his endorsement quote for the book. Or, as Michael Stone writes in his frontmatter endorsement: “Lane explores themes of kinship, memory, racial and historical inheritance, and the solace found in the natural world.”
In the story “The Locker,” Lane uniquely uses the device of telling this story in a series of email conversations between the co-owners such as (beachwalker64@now.com) and the Shearwater management team (shearwatergroup@yourmail.com) and the issue of the use of locker space that is provided to each time-share owner and the problem this creates during a period of property restoration and change. In an email from one of the partners (obouy!@aol.com) they write: “I would truly hope that someone tomorrow would locate locker #10, clean it, move out stuff there and then purchase a new lock to secure our property and mail us the key. Who at the management company told you to cut the lock? I would like to talk to them.” To which the management replies: “Someone else is in locker #10 so we can’t move you there. I apologize for this situation — but it was caused by the painters.” And on and on the emails angst-ridden conversations go for 10 pages about this petty issue pertaining to part-time resident locker space.
In another story titled “The Old Man and the Pool,” a local man wearing swimming trunks and underwater goggles shows up during a tenant residency asking, “is this a public pool?” As we learn about the lives and thoughts of the Shearwater occupants, the outsider keeps emerging from the bushes surrounding the swimming pool to inquire if he can use the pool for his own pleasures. Finally, the current occupants have exited and returned home with the new shareholder occupants arriving for their vacation only to find the goggled local there collapsed on the edge of the pool, “splayed out, face down, wearing black Speedos.” After administering some CPR to the unconscious man, the man opens his eyes, only to ask, almost hilariously, “Is this a public pool?”
In “Common Prayer,” we have retired priests celebrating their Shearwater occupancy time focusing on food and drink. With spiritually playful dialogue accenting this story, and with drinks in hand, we get comments from the just-arrived tenants and a blessing from a character named Alden, who is described as a lapsed Methodist, who proclaims: “Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat.” In a setting of quasi-religion mixed with food fetish, the story continues in a jocular mode. As one of the characters named Mike states: “I’ve become a CEO Christian in retirement — Christmas, Easter, and oyster roasts.” And we learn that Alden likes to say he “worships at the church of the Sunday New York Times.” The evening cocktail hour on the porch ends with the red wine flowing and inebriated conversation about Christian liturgy as evening storms drift north and out to sea.
A fourth favorite story is “The Hurricane,” which is about the projected path of Hurricane Engie that placed Edisto right in the center of landfall. Reminiscent of the actions and activities of Hurricane Helene here in the western mountains, the shareholders Josh and Carl (whose homes are in Spartanburg) are going full-tilt mentally and physically to prepare the beach house at Shearwater for the storm. We get all the physical machinations of boarding up the windows and securing doors, etc., in preparation as Edisto is evacuated by everyone but the two men, who ride out the storm there in the house and what Josh describes as an “intimacy machine” — exchanging conversation and Maker’s Mark bourbon. In some of the last words in the book, Josh states, “You know, you come to the beach with your friends and drink coffee or beer, and before you know it, you’re spilling your guts about your childhood or some old girlfriend.”
(Thomas Crowe is a poet, former publisher, and author of the award-winning non-fiction nature memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods.” He lives in Jackson County.)