My friends know me as an unapologetic reader of romances.
Though I prefer my romance cloaked in a literary guise, as in Michael Ondaatje’s Orientalist fantasy, The English Patient (a favorite from my schoolgirl days), I am not above supermarket paperbacks (the kind featuring well-muscled men embracing tousled, buxom women on the cover). I will even occasionally devour the short stories in the back of women’s magazines (such as Cosmo or Glamour). And they move me. Though I understand their tricks, these stories still make me cry.
I cried through the final thirty pages of Anita Shreve’s new novel, Body Surfing (Little, Brown). At 29, Sydney Sklar, the novel’s narrator, is both a divorcee and a widow. Numbed by tragedy, Sydney seems content to drift with the current. When Sydney takes a position as a summer tutor, she drifts into the Edwards family. Trouble comes in threes, and this will hold true for Sydney.
Though in many ways Body Surfing hews closely to the conventions of the genre, the book departs from the typical romance by emphasizing Sydney’s desire to make a place in the world. Sydney hungers, not for a singular passion, but for family’s comfort and security. Body Surfing plays on the contrast between the close-knit Edwards family, and Sydney’s own shattered nuclear family. Desire renders Sydney a close observer. She watches the Edwards family with an intensity that borders on obsession.
Shreve gives Sydney a voice that is slow and deliberate. Sydney seems to be all eyes, as if through sheer force of will she can assimilate the external world through her sense of sight. Consider Sydney’s description of the Edwards’ beach house in New Hampshire, “Knife blades of grass pierce the wooden slats of the boardwalk. Sweet pea overtakes the thatch. Unwanted fists of thistle push upward from the sand. On the small deck at the end of the boardwalk are two white Adirondack chairs…and a faded umbrella behind them. Two rusted and immensely heavy iron bases for the umbrella sit in a corner, neither of which, Sydney guesses, will ever leave the deck.”