Marriage Full of Secrets Takes a Melodramatic Turn

SEA GLASS

A Novel

by Anita Shreve

Little, Brown

384 pages, $25.95

*

Anita Shreve’s “Sea Glass” returns readers to the coastal home that has figured prominently in two of her previous novels, “Fortune’s Rocks” and “The Pilot’s Wife.” Set in a small New Hampshire town in the summer of 1929, “Sea Glass” charts a year in the life of a young woman whose seemingly perfect marriage unravels just after the stock market crash.

Honora Willard meets her future husband, Sexton Beecher, when she is just 20 and he is 24. The handsome, ambitious typewriter salesman walks into the bank where she works one day, and within three months, flirting leads to a marriage proposal, an offer Honora can’t refuse. “He was charming and persistent in a way she had never experienced before,” Shreve writes.

Although Sexton presents himself as successful and drives a brand new Buick, Honora isn’t sure if he’s telling her the truth. She can’t help noticing Sexton’s “too-tight collars and a sole coming loose from a shoe. Sometimes the sleeves of his shirts were frayed at the cuffs.” Intertwined with the stories of Sexton and Honora are those of the book’s other characters: McDermott, who works at the local mill, fixing looms; Francis, a fatherless boy whom McDermott looks after; and Vivian, a Boston socialite who befriends Honora.

As long as Sexton is successful, however, those characters are not too involved in their lives. It’s just Honora and Sexton, focused on each other, beginning a promising new life together in the beach house at Fortune’s Rocks. The fixer-upper house is a former convent, three stories high, white with black shutters. At first they rent it, but when the owner offers to sell the house for $4,000, Sexton decides they have to buy it. “He wants it so much that it sometimes makes his hands shake,” Shreve writes.

“He can’t explain the feeling to himself rationally. Rationally, the house is no bargain.... And yet ... and yet ... if he can just secure this one thing, have this one possession, he will feel that somehow he’s ahead of the game. That he’s gotten the jump on life.” While Sexton is preoccupied with scoring the next big deal and Honora is a lonely housewife, Shreve conveys well the silences and concessions prevalent in a marriage, the gestures made just to keep the peace.

It’s obvious that purchasing the house is the wrong thing to do, and that disaster will come of it, but Sexton is so blinded by his need for success that he never stops to find out what his cautious wife wants. Since Honora has no clue what her husband has done to get the house (taking out loans they can’t afford), she goes along with whatever he wants, hoping that their finances are still in order.

It’s after Sexton leads them to ruin, following the stock market crash, that “Sea Glass” begins its descent into melodrama and violence. The pieces of sea glass that Honora has been collecting each day take on a portentous meaning. Sexton becomes so evasive that his lonely wife turns to McDermott for comfort and companionship.

When Sexton loses his sales job, he works at a local mill and becomes involved with a workers’ strike that turns dangerous. A group of men, including McDermott, sets up shop at the Beechers’ house, where they develop a plan to demand higher wages and fair treatment. Only Vivian offers moments of comic relief, as she “tries to imagine what it would feel like to know that one had lost everything ... that one could never go to Havana or throw a party at the Plaza Hotel. That one would have to get a job. She tries to picture what possible work she could find if it happened to her, and that thought frightens her.” And at the peak of the workers’ strike, only Vivian could be concerned about having to get her emerald ring sized, a task she has been meaning to do all summer.

Despite being shielded from the harsh realities of the Depression, Vivian proves a sympathetic, loyal friend to Honora and is perhaps the most subtly drawn character in the novel. Honora is pure-thinking, beautiful, kind and as forgiving as a saint; Sexton is an oily, unhappy man who inevitably suffers a tragic fate; McDermott is a rugged, honest Irish Catholic who quietly awaits the day that he can express his love for Honora. And Francis is a poor boy who finds the perfect father-figure hero in McDermott, and whose every utterance reveals his innocence and goodness.

It’s a shame that Shreve doesn’t seem to trust that her characters’ relationships will suffice in maintaining interest, or know that a little complexity in a person isn’t a bad thing. In the latter half of the novel, Shreve relies heavily on plot, which becomes full of foreshadowing that devastation is to come. Aside from a few forced efforts at lyricism, however, she is able to strike a balance between being a commercial writer and a literary one. And “Sea Glass” is a novel that manages, impressively, to stay absorbing even when it seems melodramatic or predictable.