Wednesday
May092007
BOOKS: BODY SURFING by Anita Shreve
Wednesday, May 9, 2007 at 11:05AM Lucky #13 for Anita Shreve...Masterful, Compelling
BODY SURFING
by Anita Shreve
(Little, Brown and Company, 2007)
Hardcover, 295 pages, $25.99 U.S. - Buy for less at CLICK HERE to WIN a copy of BODY SURFING!!
From the book jacket:
"At the age of twenty-nine, Sydney has already been once divorced and once widowed. Trying to regain her footing after this tragic double blow, she answers the ad of a couple seeking a tutor for their teenage daughter and ends up spending the summer at the cottage of the Edwards family on the stunning New Hampshire coast..."
Enter two grown sons, who are both instantly attracted to the young widow; add on a raging case of adult sibling rivalry, family secrets and disappointments, and you have the magic ingredients for Anita Shreve's Lucky #13: BODY SURFING.
BODY SURFING is Lucky #13 (for us, the readers) on four counts:
1) Masterful writing;
2) Great story, unexpected developments;
3) Compelling characters, tightly drawn: vivid, delicious;
4) The House
Masterful writing:
Shreve's writing style mirrors the stark New England coast she loves so much: incredibly clean, spare, seemingly cold, even removed at times. This quiet clarity is exactly what makes her writing so powerful: She cuts out the blah, blah, blah to get at the deep inner workings of characters, relationships and events.At her recent Book Event in Atlanta, Shreve talked about her use of a 'vignette' approach in BODY SURFING. There is lots of white space between short, choppy paragraphs, with details, background and snippets that seem to jump around quite a bit. This didn't seem much different from her characteristic writing style, and highlights even more her skill. While it can be unnerving: you're afraid to presume too much, and wonder what you may be missing in the white spaces in-between, it adds to the tension. Especially with the vignettes, you might think she's not giving much depth. Shreve takes her time getting into the main conflict, to develop characters and events, and then she plunges right on in, typically with a change in the weather that parallels the conflict (always subtle). At the turning point, you realize you are deeply drawn in, and the second half of Shreve's books unfold very quickly, with surprising twists and turns.
Great story, unexpected developments:
Shreve continues to mine her talent for stories about strong women in difficult circumstances, "Life, intensely felt," as she characterized it at the Atlanta event. BODY SURFING is about finding one's self after great tragedy; recovery; re-examination of life, love and expectations. At the same time she is trying to put her own life back together, Sydney is drawn to the Edwardses' family dynamic and relationships: marriage, parents & children, brothers & sisters, adult sibling rivalry. Very surprising turns.Compelling characters, tightly drawn: vivid, delicious:
Although Sydney remains somewhat aloof and emotionally reserved as the main narrative character, Shreve's depiction of the other characters in the book is compelling, especially Mrs. Edwards, the matriarch of the family, and Sydney's archrival. Shreve is bitter, acidic and downright (deliciously!) bitchy with Mrs. Edwards, who deserves it as an aging, anti-Semitic, jealous, passive-aggressive poser:"The woman might well look windblown, Sydney thought. One child would marry a Jew. A second was a lesbian. A third, by all acounts heterosexual, had absented himself from the family indefinitely.
All this she blamed on Sydney." -- page 164
The House:
This is the 4th novel to be set in the same beach house on the New Hampshire coast. I love that continuity. Shreve explores this concept in BODY SURFING, when Mr. Edwards tells Sydney about the history of the house as a home for unwed mothers in the 1800s (Fortune's Rocks); a refuge for Marxists and anti-union activists in the 1930s (Sea Glass); and the home of the infamous pilot's widow (The Pilot's Wife), from whom the Edwards acquired the house at a bargain.Some of Mr. Edwards history of the house, and Sydney's musings about it echo Anita Shreve's author's remarks at the end of Sea Glass, where she talks about discovering a beautiful house on a vacation in Maine, and how she was drawn to it:
"The house had a graciousness and serenity that was exceptional, and I think it is fair to say that I fell in love with it..."
"A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell..."
When asked, "Why did you set both novels in the same house?"
Shreve answered, "I had been thinking about the fact that an old house might have many stories to tell. Ten or eleven women, each with her own life, her own story, could be imagined to have lived in the house that was featured in The Pilot's Wife and Fortune's Rocks..."
And here it is again, in BODY SURFING. The beach house figures almost as prominently as a character in all four novels in which it appears, sheltering all these lives and intrigue:
"[Sydney] follows the roofline of the house with her eyes and then settles on the front porch. She wonders if there have been other weddings in the house. There must have been, she guesses, multiple wedding and births and deaths. She hopes on balance there has been more joy than pain in the building." -- page 191
Here at the end of a very long review, I must admit to a very small disappointment in Anita Shreve's last two novels, Light on Snow and A Wedding in December, books 11 and 12 in a very long string of phenomenal successes. I read them both, and enjoyed them more than a lot of other books I have read, but still, I am so happy to say the magic is back, full-on, in BODY SURFING. Enjoy.
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