Sea Glass by Anita Shreve

I must confess I've been a long-time fan of Anita Shreve, even BEFORE she wrote "The Pilot's Wife" and got the Oprah treatment, plus movie (which was, as usual, not nearly as good as the novel).

I first read her novel, "Strange Fits of Passion" back in the 80s when I found it at a musty, dim-lit paperback bookstore. I was hooked on her style and fatalistic story themes of 'love gone bad, wrong and downright fatal.'

"Sea Glass," set during the 30s Depression, lives up to all her earlier novels. I also enjoy the way Shreve can bring an old house ALIVE, make it a place you think you may have once seen or want to see at some point. Old houses feature prominently in several of her novels as well.

For today's excerpts, I've chosen several passages that represent various types of GREAT descriptive prose.

Honora likes to walks the tracks. She puts her hands inside the pockets of her dress, sets her cloche on her head, and points herself north or south along the railroad tracks. She appreciates the way they stretch out seemingly forever -- the ultimate open road. No stop signs, no traffic, seldom an encounter with any other person, though there is plenty of life. The backs of houses that no one ever sees. Wash on a line. An old Ford up on blocks. Summer tea in a jar on a picnic table next to a well. An open garage filled with rusted bits of machinery. Sometimes she passes another woman in an apron and a head scarf, hanging out her laundry, and she and the woman wave to each other. But if Honora sees a man on a back stoop smoking a cigarette, a man who is home in the middle of the day, she doesn't wave. When a train passes, she steps back from the gravel bed and waits for the engineer to give her a quick salute.

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When they returned to the house, an air of reproach had permeated the rooms, like that of a once-favored dog who'd been left alone all day and hadn't yet been walked.

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[Regarding protagonist collecting sea glass along the shore]

She prizes the oddities -- a nugget of crystal threaded with rusted metal; a pale aqua rectangle the exact size and shape of a microscope slide; a shard that looks like ancient Roman glass, a lovely mottled green and gold. She finds a translucent ochre chip imprinted with a W, another bit that bears a thicket of white crosshatching, the paint still more or less intact. She finds larger pieces that are flat and guesses that they might have once been parts of windows, and that makes her think of shipwrecks. Once she finds a deformed bit of bottle, and that makes her think of Halifax [where devastating explosion occurred]. Is it too fanciful to imagine that a bottle melted in the aftermath of the explosion and then was swept out to sea on the tidal wave that followed? Was a whole city of shards made smooth by time and sand?

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[Secondary character regarding being left alone while boyfriend is away -- very telling about how many women feel in a relationship]

Dickie fretted Vivian would be bored, that she'd have nothing to do....
Dickie needn't have worried, Vivian thinks. She has not been bored, not for one minute. When Dickie called her that first day to see how she was faring, she could hardly keep contentment from her voice. She hadn't seen a single soul socially, she told him, nor had she once put on a decent dress. She'd read, she said. And she'd actually cooked a meal. She'd walked down to the general store, met the proprietor, and walked back again with milk and coffee. She'd spent hours on the veranda watching the water. Last night, she had to feign disappointment at his news that he would be gone another day.

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A thoroughly good read, highly recommended.

About Prose Passages

I've been reading an exceptional lot lately, novel after novel, and always find beautiful, thoughtful, insightful passages the author occasionally stumbles upon in the creative process.

How do I know this? Because I have written over 20 novels, and know that often when a character takes over, insights come seemingly from them and/or the cosmic consciousness. Universal truths, profound insights, even beautiful, electrifying prose passages.

With this blog, I hope to post such passages as I come upon them while reading -- giving tribute to the authors and the novels. Although these passage do not necessarily have to be from novels, but any book with noteworthy prose.

So, let's get started:

"The Virgin of Small Plains" by Nancy Pickard

Moments before a tornado hits this fictional Kansas town, the protagonist stands mesmerized, staring out a cafe window at the impending doom:

"Abby had hurried back to the windows to check on the storm one more time before going to the basement, but then she found that she couldn't pull herself away from the sight of her town's main street. There was something magical to her about the moments right before, and then immediatly after, a thunderstorm. There was something uncanny and beautiful about the quality of the light and the way everything looked in it....

The air darkened even more, changing the feeling of the scene at which she was staring. Now, in the eerie, ominous cast of the greenish light, everything looked hyper-accentuated, as if an artist had outlined every building with a black line, making all of them pop out from the air around them. Abby thought it still looked beautiful in a strange way, like a painting by a demented artist. There were odd angles she had never noticed before, juxtapositions of signs she could swear she had never seen before. The gargoyles on the nineteenth-century bank building on the corner seemed to shift on their pedestals, to flash their builging eyes."