Body Surfing: A Novel

The beach house in New Hampshire which figured in Anita Shreve's The Pilot's Wife , Fortune's Rocks , and Sea Glass is once again featured in Body Surfing . This time, it is the summer home of the Edwards family, Anna and Mark and daughter Julie. Mrs. Edwards has great hopes for Julie, who is "slow," so she hires Sydney to tutor her, in preparation for her senior year. There are two older brothers, Jeff and Ben, whose arrival changes the household dynamic considerably. Once again, Shreve revisits the minefield of love and betrayal that she has explored so well in her best novels. Sydney is 29, twice married, once divorced, and once a widow. She is floundering, not sure she wants to go back to school, accepting whatever job comes along and then moving on. She answers the ad for a tutor and finds herself in the Edwards household, where she discovers that Julie has undiscovered artistic talent. Mrs. Edwards dislikes her instantly, is dismissive, and treats her like a servant. Mr. Edwards befriends her, shows her his roses and talks to her about the history of the house, giving the reader a rundown of the role the house has played in prior novels. Sydney, Jeff, and Ben go body surfing late one night and Sydney is sure that Ben has tried to grope her underwater. She takes immediate umbrage at this and treats him coldly thereafter. Shreve's other work has a steady narrative flow, but this novel is episodic and disjointed. There is the the arrival of Jeff's girlfriend, her departure, an evening when Julie comes home drunk and won't talk about it, and a liaison between Sydney and Jeff which leads to the complications that eventually define the novel. There is a twist at the end, involving the brothers, that is divisive, destructive and rather hard to believe. While this is not Shreve's best effort, because the characters are not well-defined, it is worth reading her take on what happens to people when they compete for love. --Valerie Ryan From Publishers Weekly Deceptive love and stark betrayal form the icy core of this dark 12th novel from Oprah-anointed ( The Pilot's Wife ), Orange Prize finalist ( The Weight of Water ) Shreve. Set adrift at 29 by the sudden death of her second husband (her first divorced her), smart, underemployed Sydney (no last name) signs on for a quiet New England oceanfront summer of tutoring 18-year-old Julie, the intellectually slow but artistically talented and strikingly beautiful daughter of the fractious Edwards clan. The family includes Julie's brothers—35-year-old Boston corporate real estate man Ben and 31-year-old M.I.T. poli-sci professor Jeff—and the three children's parents. Sydney is half-Jewish, and Mrs. Edwards is anti-Semitic. Family tensions escalate when Julie disappears, then resurfaces in Montreal as the lesbian lover of 25-year-old Helene (a body surfer who frequented the beach near the Edwardses' home). Jeff and Sydney bond during their search for Julie, nights of passion leading to plans for a joyous wedding, which get very complicated when the couple returns to Edwards central. Shreve's devastating depiction of the family's dissolution—the culmination of sublimated jealousies suddenly exploding into the open—is wrenching. Shreve's omniscience is asserted with such ease that it often feels like she's toying with her characters, but her control is masterful, particularly in the sure-handed and compassionate aftermath. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Shreve's latest features the same seaside New Hampshire house that appears in three of her best novels ( The Pilot's Wife, 1998; Fortune's Rocks , 1999; and Sea Glass, 2002). Now it's the place where 29-year-old Sydney comes to heal from her turbulent romantic life. Once divorced and once widowed, she is still reeling and feels unable to continue with graduate school. Instead, she's taken a summer job tutoring the sweet but slow youngest child of a wealthy architect; she is made to feel like a part of the family by the gracious Mr. Edwards and like a paid servant by the more status-conscious Mrs. Edwards. For her part, Sydney is almost afraid to let go of her mourning for her second husband, afraid that she will lose the only connection to him that remains. But then the Edwards' two older sons turn up, and both are intent on drawing Sydney out. They teach her to night surf and ply her with witty conversation and good food and wine. She soon becomes caught between the two brothers, who engage in an intense bout of sibling rivalry, with devastating consequences. In simple yet eloquent style, Shreve portrays the arc of a complicated romantic relationship, from infatuation to betrayal. What's more, she builds in a palpable sense of suspense as well as a deep empathy for human frailty. The ever-skillful Shreve delivers yet another gripping read that will satisfy her many fans and earn her some new ones. Joanne Wilkinson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of more than fifteen novels, including Testimony; The Pilot's Wife , which was a selection of Oprah's Book Club; and The Weight of Water , which was a finalist for England's Orange prize. She lives in Massachusetts. From The Washington Post Reviewed by Suzanne Berne Over the course of 12 previous books, Anita Shreve has presented her characters with some of life's worst vicissitudes, and Sydney Sklar, the heroine of Body Surfing, is no exception. Once divorced and once widowed by 29, she's deeply shaken, but in a manner so circumspect and stoical that Shreve barely nods at it: "The double blow of the divorce and death left Sydney in a state of emotional paralysis, during which she was unable to finish her thesis in developmental psychology and had to withdraw from her graduate program at Brandeis." As a way to "drift and heal," Sydney takes a string of "odd jobs," the most recent of which is tutoring beautiful Julie Edwards, a teenage girl with learning disabilities, at her parents' atmospheric beach house on the New Hampshire coast. The Edwards's house is quickly recognizable as the one featured in three of Shreve's previous novels, Fortune's Rocks, Sea Glass and The Pilot's Wife, so Sydney fits neatly into a long line of troubled women. Not only is she bereaved and divorced, she's estranged from her parents and essentially alone in the world. Plus she's half-Jewish in a WASP enclave that makes the L.L. Bean catalogue look diverse. (Shreve has some fun with preppy stereotypes, such as the guest who "has the studied reticence of a recovering alcoholic surrounded by alcohol.") Sydney's troubles increase with the arrival of Julie's much older brothers, Ben and Jeff, who are both smitten with Sydney the first afternoon when they watch her body-surfing. As she stumbles out of the surf, Jeff greets her with a dry towel, and romantic complications ensue. One of the pleasures of Shreve's novels is that nothing ever happens simply, especially not affairs of the heart. In this case, Sydney falls for Jeff over Ben, though Ben is single and Jeff is supposed to be marrying the polished Victoria -- adored by his shallow, social-climbing mother. Even this entanglement looks straightforward when docile Julie ties the whole household in knots with an unanticipated romance of her own. Because Jeff and Sydney become engaged at almost the exact midpoint of the book, one knows that difficulties lurk ahead, all of which Sydney meets gracefully, if somewhat automatically. Her "emotional paralysis" is conveyed in the fragmentary style Shreve has adopted in this novel: Every scene is chopped into short, deadpan segments. The effect of so much white space also highlights the curious detachment both Sydney and Shreve maintain toward Sydney's precarious situation. If only Sydney would swear a few times! Throw a fish fork at someone! But even when subjected to shocking cruelty, she responds with somber wisdom: "She knows now that with time . . . a kind of necessary acceptance will form around her, like a lobster making its new shell, one that will be soft and easily breakable in the beginning but so hard that only lobster crackers can shatter it in the end." This passage points to what is so alluring and so puzzling about this book: the notion that pain can be borne attractively. Like Sydney, who recovers from a hideous disappointment in an elegant Boston hotel (where she is courted by a suave Italian), the suggestion seems to be that one can look good in misery, be dignified instead of abject. Shreve quite rightly emphasizes the importance of plunging into life bravely again and again, no matter how tumbled one gets by the waves of fate. Unfortunately, people in pain tend to look and act as wretchedly as they feel, and when at last they stumble out of the surf, rarely is anyone smitten with them. Usually the beach is deserted, not a dry towel in sight. Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. Read more