Seeing through glass darkly
Sara Maitland
SEA GLASS by Anita Shreve LittleBrown, £12.99, pp. 325, ISBN 0316859095 For some time I have been baffled about why the contemporary novel is 'failing' its readers, about why have we turned away from fiction towards the hideous 'con
fessionaT genre and the true-story adventure.
Sea Glass explains a lot, because it is very good. Shreve occupies an enviable position, poised somewhere delicately between the 'literary' and the 'popular' novelist. This is well earned — Sea Glass delivers just what it should: a well thought out plot with sensitive emotional understanding, writing with wonderful luminous moments. It is set in 1929, clearly well researched and full of period detail which is never allowed to get in the way of the emotional story — about what happens to a variety of people when the Wall Street crash breaks up lives and challenges expectations. Ft has intimacy, immediacy and an engaging protagonist in Honora, an interesting young woman trying to make sense of her husband and her own life in the face of disaster. It has a range of other characters, all with their own clear points of view. It builds up to a highly dramatic climax (a disastrous mill strike). It organises a satisfying closure which is not too much of a fairytale ending, but is still optimistic and open towards a future for all the characters we have come to like best. It is highly readable.
So what's the problem? Firstly it is completely unmemorable — I enjoyed reading it, but when I came to sit down to review it, I could not remember the names of any of the characters. It is unmemorable because, like most middle-brow novels, it depends on an idea that people do not really believe in any more. The publisher's press release tells us (twice) that this is a 'story of the human heart', but in most other areas of life we do not buy the concept of the universal 'human heart', the faith that, however different the externals of our lives, we are bound together by a common emotional truth which transcends mere accidents of history. In virtually no other area are we expected to believe this. Elsewhere we look for 'unique' individuals and cultural differences.
We are losing the knack of perceiving the general in the particular. But the novel's impact depends on the idea that readers will be able to find their own lives in Honora's or other characters'. This applies to metaphors as well as characters — a central image of the novel is the sea glass that Honora collects, which is given beauty by its immersion, shaped and polished in the rough ocean. It is a good image, but will readers decode it? Nineteenth-century novelists did not have this problem; they could trust their readers to 'get it'. If readers can't read at two levels at once, there is not a lot of point in fiction: novels become pleasurable escapism. 'Real life' will be more interesting.
Sea Glass is not a bad novel; it's a very good novel of its kind and its kind has served the reading public for well over a century. Now it seems somehow dated. Perhaps I have misconstrued my concern: the real question is, why are its readers failing the contemporary novel?
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