The character of Alice came to Maine writer Caitlin Shetterly during the early days of the pandemic, as she fretted about toilet paper rationing and took a raft of immune-boosting supplements to protect her and her family from COVID.
“Another voice came into my head, and it was Alice,” said Shetterly, whose new book, “Pete and Alice in Maine,” comes out next week via HarperCollins. “The first chapter of the book just fell out of me. I knew this person. And eventually, it became a novel.”
Pete and Alice escape COVID-ravaged New York City for Maine, taking their two daughters with them to their summer home in the Blue Hill area — the same part of the state where Shetterly grew up as the daughter of artist Robert Shetterly and author Susan Hand Shetterly.
But where Shetterly lived a back-to-the-land childhood in rural Maine, Pete and Alice are as New York as they come: wealthy, highly educated and disconnected from the realities of Maine, a place they only visit for half the summer each year. They don’t know the names of their neighbors in Blue Hill. They miss the creature comforts of a big city. They struggle to learn how to adjust to living in Maine outside of the summer season.
“I remember feeling very real concern back then that all these people were going to come to Maine during the pandemic and overwhelm us, and really threaten very vulnerable people in our state,” Shetterly said. “That became sort of a springboard for this story.”
Suddenly, Maine becomes home for the young family, and in the midst of it all Alice and Pete’s marriage and sense of identity begin to unravel — a process that is told in intimate, unsparing, often funny and always exacting detail by Shetterly.
“Pete and Alice” is Shetterly’s third book and first novel, after “Modified: GMOs and the Threat to Our Food, Our Land, Our Future,” a nonfiction book published in 2016, and “Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke, Finding Home,” a memoir published in 2011.
“Pete and Alice” delves thrillingly into a topic that has always been at the core of Shetterly’s work: the complex dynamics of marriage, in deed and in words both said and unsaid. Following the work of her literary mentors like John Updike and Alice Munro, as well as editing the short story anthology “Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce,” back in 2001, marriages functional, non-functional and in-between are endlessly fascinating for her.
“Aren’t we all fascinated by relationships? Isn’t that all we gossip about?” Shetterly said. “I think, between growing up in a very volatile household, and then spending so much time thinking about it as a writer and editor, it comes very naturally to me. I have always been an observer, and observing couples never ceases to fascinate me.”
Like most human beings, Alice and Pete are deeply flawed and not always eminently likable. They make many mistakes, and are sometimes tone deaf in the way they communicate with people. For Shetterly, staying brutally honest in her writing was much more important than softening the sharp edges of a couple in the throes of crisis.
“I wanted to write a bracingly honest book about marriage,” she said. “It’s not the Instagram perfect version of marriage. It’s how things actually are. And it’s not always pretty.”
Despite all those prickly, difficult elements to their story, it is hard to end up not empathizing in some way with Pete and Alice. It would be easy for year-round Mainers living a less privileged existence than Shetterly’s COVID refugees to judge them for their faults. But as “Pete and Alice” shows, it doesn’t matter where you’re from or what resources you have at your disposal: at the end of the day, we all have to live with each other.
“Pete and Alice in Maine” is out on July 4 and is available wherever books are sold. Shetterly will hold book talks and signings at Mechanics Hall in Portland with Print: A Bookstore on July 6; the Mockingbird Bookshop on Bath on July 10; the Blue Hill Public Library on July 13; the Northeast Harbor Library on July 19, and the Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor on July 20.
