David Macfarlane lost me for a while, and I can tell you where: on the front page of The Globe and Mail Arts section, where he writes a column to open the week. Maybe it’s a generational thing, or a Monday thing, maybe a contagion spread by all the Globe regulars who’ve irked me over the longer term; whichever, the column didn’t agree with me. I tried, I truly did, but it kept coming up emptily arch and opaque. I had to stop reading it. A few more weeks and I was afraid I’d imperil the admiration I have for The Danger Tree, Macfarlane’s beautiful, transporting 1991 book of family, war, and Newfoundland.

I still avoid the column, but I can report now that any faith I may have lost in Macfarlane has been restored. His new novel got it back again. Summer Gone has its imperfections, but on the whole it’s a marvellous book, tender and plaintive, a beautifully rendered inhabitation of summer and its country of cottages, camps, and canoe trips. It’s a novel, too, about time: what we’ll do to try to make it hold still, how we try to reclaim it when it has past, how, every time, it breaks the heart.

“Summer,” goes the motto of the camp in the novel, “is the stillness between things.” Macfarlane is interested in that same stillness, in the pauses and the calm, the depths of the in-between. He borrows from Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory for his epigraph: “This is ecstasy, and behind ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a vacuum into which rushes all that I love.”

For Bay Newling, summer is that vacuum, and he wants to live there, ecstatically, full-time. Occupying the centre of Macfarlane’s story – or sterning it – Bay is a son of the small southern Ontario town of Cathcart. He’s a little lonely, a little in-turned, but his trajectory is plain enough: an upright Cathcart childhood, a move to Toronto, marriage to Sarah, a son in Caz, a job editing a magazine he doesn’t like. What sustains him – and illuminates the novel – is his dream of summer. It’s his sacred place, a refuge he’s built for himself out of memory and dream, out of the gentle fictions of The Outdoorsman’s Guide, out of repeated exaggerations and outright lies. Summer is how he stops time: in his mind, it’s a continuum flowing out of the summer in the early 1960s when he went to camp. Never mind the casual bullying or the sneer of the nickname he gets (“Baby”) – Bay is, from the start, terminally enthralled by the myths and promises and possibilities of the season. He sees it all summed up in his counsellor, Lark, and what he can do out there on calm water with a canoe. For Bay, the canoeist commands the stillness of summer, the power and the delicacy of its moment. Bay makes the connection and cultivates it: to him, summer and canoeing are how he’s going to fix the past, perfect the present, guarantee the future. It doesn’t work out that way: idyll that it is for Bay, summer is in fact the scene of all his disasters. The book’s title sets you up for it, but it’s still a bit of a shock, the loneliness and loss that hold on to you at the end.

After everything goes awry (I’d tell you how, but then I’d have to float you downstream without a paddle), Bay takes his young son Caz on a canoe trip. Seasons and canoe craft aside, it’s Macfarlane’s perception of the rhythms and riddles that exist between fathers and sons wherein the book’s true energy resides, and its authority, too. On the water, over the portages, around the campfire, Bay means to connect, to make up the distances between them, to teach his son – everything. He wants to tell him about canoes, about how to go into the outdoors, about his own life and its complex explanations. He means, in short, to welcome him into his own private continuum.

If we read novels to apprehend the world – I think we do and I think we should – if we read them to nod at the details, the resonances, to mutter, yes, this is how things are, then Macfarlane is a novelist to read. Summer Gone is full of small, solid truths, of Melmac bowls and careful cottage rituals, of a funeral “where toothpicks and napkins … collect sadly in men’s jacket pockets.” He’s sometimes wry, as when he describes Toronto’s Gardiner expressway as an extramarital affair: “It didn’t have to, necessarily, one couldn’t have been sure that it would, but it did: ruin everything.” He’s sometimes poetic, as when he takes in Ontario’s “tumultuous” lake land, “its blustery water, windrowed skies, glacier-smoothed granite shores, and starkly galed pines.”

He’s often funny. When an eager counsellor at Bay’s camp suggests that the cabins be lent the name of native tribes, the director withers him with this: “I think, given most of your family backgrounds, that it would make more sense if we gave each group the name of a law firm, or a stock brokerage, or a bank.”

Summer Gone isn’t without its faults. Bay’s wife is no more than a wafting shadow, and there’s a phantom narrator who’s not effectively integrated into the story. Doesn’t matter. The novel that rushes all around them has the power, the balance, and the beauty of a lone canoeist.