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A Seahorse Year

A SEAHORSE Year does not start off promisingly. Stacey D’Erasmo embarks on her second novel like a creative writing student who has been instructed to “show, don’t tell.” The first few pages are a dutiful laying out of the minutiae of her characters’ lives. Hal is tending a fish tank that contains “...a lionfish, a snowflake eel, three temperamental tangs, and a bamboo cat shark,” which goes to show that the author knows her fish. Nan is surveying her garden, ticking off four square beds of flowers, planks of silvered wood, grass, trumpet vines, a flowering plum tree, some daisies, and a stone statue. Marina, Nan’s girlfriend, is in her studio, which gives rise to a pagelong list of artist’s equipment and a sample from her CD collection. I’ll spare you the details.

   Through this dizzying plethora of stuff, we learn what we are supposed to think of these people. Christopher is the mentally disturbed teenage son - later diagnosed schizophrenic - who loves fish and has gone missing. Hal is the former local rock star, now an accountant, who once impregnated Nan with a turkey-baster. Nan is the bookshop owner who knows her long-time lover is having an affair with a much younger woman. And Tamara is Christopher’s girlfriend, the PJ Harvey fan with the over-plucked eyebrows and permanently cynical expression.

   D’Erasmo does her characters a disservice by introducing them to us in terms of their lives’ paraphernalia. It is only when she stops showing them to the reader and lets them get on with their lives that they become real. When they are allowed to live, this little group does so with a vengeance, each relating their own version of events in a complex dance of rotating perspectives.

   A Seahorse Year is rich with the private exchanges between two people that make up the dynamic of an extended family group. In bed, Marina considers the scar on Nan’s right hip, and one toenail that is wavy and yellowed: familiar landmarks, she thinks to herself. “There,” she tells Nan as she brings her to orgasm, “I have you. I have you, Nan.” The “old cracked maroon cock” Nan pulls from the bedside drawer tells us vastly more than all the lyrical descriptions of fish tanks and gardens in the beginning. Clutched by Nan “like a rescue buoy,” Marina deludes herself that Nan is oblivious of her infidelity. But Nan is obsessed: Is the stupid girl young? Rich? Do they meet at Marina’s studio? At night?

   Hal is similarly anxious as he embarks on a new romance: Was that kiss sexy or brotherly? Does it matter to him that I’m white? Does Capricorn get along with Aquarius?

   The plot, driven by Christopher’s illness, forces hands. The tentative relationships between lovers are brought into relief by the fierce certainty of parental instinct shifting into gear. Lovers suddenly find themselves faced with that moment when sexual alliance must become solid partnership, or die. Nan and Hal, meanwhile, seem more and more like a married couple. Their shared anguish draws them together in spite of themselves, shutting others out.

   Through it all, Christopher’s relationship with Tamara thrives outside the borders of reality. The teenagers lie on Christopher’s floor holding each other’s breath, plotting to run away to Fiji. Their confidence in each other never waivers.

   A Seahorse Year is, unabashedly, a novel about love. At its heart is Tamara’s expression of love as respect for another’s reality: “the idea that a person is that person, just that one, and no other, and who that person is should be honored... if you honor that person you sort of step aside to let him pass to wherever he’s going. You honor the motion.” When Christopher claims he can breathe underwater, Tamara knows that doesn’t mean he’s going to stick his head in the bath:

And maybe he can breathe in water, who’s to
say? She isn’t going to test him. That’s where
honor comes in: she honors his belief, the way
you have to honor the belief of people in Fiji
that the water spirits desire gifts, or whatever
it is they believe. You just have to toss the
flower into the water with an open hand.

   But Christopher does step into the Pacific to breathe, and very nearly drowns.

   A Seahorse Year is a wise and intricate account of a group of people negotiating the heartache they cause each other. They must each learn what fifteen-year-old Tamara already knows: that the key to the dance is respecting the path of the other dancers, letting the other dancers pass. The story suggests that Tamara and Christopher must learn, too, the limits that life places on that kind of love. Amidst all the adults’ convolutions and compromises, it is Tamara’s voice that rings clear and true. The strength of her faith leads the reader to suspect that, whatever poetic injustices may be wreaked by plot, she is right: Love must always believe in Fiji and breathing underwater, or flounder in a sea of grown-up stuff.

Houghton Mifflin (hardback), 2004, 360 pages, around $24