THE GREAT INLAND SEA
By David Francis. MacAdam/Cage. 247 pp. $23
Every publishing season a few ambitious, highly anticipated and well-publicized novels gobble up what little space remains in the public discourse for the discussion of serious fiction. These lodestar novels, by appearing on the front pages of weekly book reviews and on the short lists of Booker and Pulitzer Prize nominees, help us determine the course of our national critical conversation. At least a passing familiarity with them is a condition of entry into chattering-class cocktail parties and literary events. Read or unread, they are the "big books" that everyone is talking about.
For each one of them, a hundred small but worthy efforts, many by first-time authors, must struggle like heliotropic shoots through layers of soil to find a few nourishing rays of attention. The Great Inland Sea , which marks the debut of David Francis, an Australian currently living in Los Angeles, may turn out to be one such novel. Its scope is determinedly narrow; its characters speak only for themselves, not for any larger zeitgeist or contrarian cultural impulse. If this season's big books are six-course, prix-fixe meals with wine pairings, The Great Inland Sea is a wooden bowl of ripe cherries: graceful and unaffected.
On Rehoboth Beach in 1955, a young man named Day snaps photographs of a woman riding a horse. After disappearing into the fog, the woman re-emerges alone; the horse, she tells Day, drowned as she attempted to make it swim. Minutes later the dead animal washes up on the beach. Its rider, in training to be an Olympic equestrienne, is cavalier: "He wasn't going to be an important horse," she states flatly. Day is enchanted by her, in spite of her perverse coldness, and he keeps his mortification to himself.
From this ball of yarn, Francis weaves a bittersweet story that follows Day from his youth in the Australian bush to his maturation on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where he has traveled in an effort to put as much distance as possible between himself and his father. Day takes a job breaking horses on an estate in exchange for room and board. It is here that he meets Callie, the rider on the beach -- the kind of woman, he notes, who "can be cruel without being angry." In addition to horses, Callie seems to know an awful lot about how to start fires. When a field belonging to Day's employer burns down mysteriously, the besotted Day must decide whether this bright and beautiful, but clearly disturbed, young woman is worth the trouble.
He ultimately decides that she is, but she ultimately decides that he isn't. Callie abandons him, and so begins Day's long journey into night. Emotionally uprooted, he returns home to the Australian bush to nurse his broken heart and to make an uneasy peace with his father. While there, Day hopes to learn, finally, the truth about his mentally unstable mother, the circumstances surrounding her decline and death, and his father's participation in both.
Francis, who toils as a lawyer when he's not creating sensitive coming-of-age tales, writes with the quiet confidence of someone who knows that his inspirations would approve. As the scales fall from Day's eyes and he begins to understand the complexities of adulthood, he's not unlike an Australian-born Joel Knox, the father-seeking protagonist of Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms , some of whose gothic trappings and atmosphere of sexual frustration seem cleverly reformulated here. In those parts of it that take place in Australia, The Great Inland Sea may remind readers of the first half of True History of the Kelly Gang , the Booker Prize-winning novel in which Francis's countryman, Peter Carey, wrought weird beauty out of the squalid outback.
At one point in the story, a 9-year-old Day visits with a man who will disappear for many years, only to re-emerge in Day's adult life as both a comfort and a rival. Together they stare out at the desert vestige of the novel's namesake, the Great Inland Sea, which covered a sizeable chunk of Australia 100 million years ago. "That was once all ocean," the boy tells the man. "There are specks of shells in the sand."
The realization that a thing can eventually become its opposite -- that a vast ocean can turn to scorched, dry sand -- is at the heart of Francis's affecting first novel. In one way or another, all the important people in Day's life are revealed, over time, to be something other than what he'd been led to believe. The Great Inland Sea aims to do nothing more than tell of one young man's coming to terms with the unpredictability of the grown-up world. It achieves its goal elegantly. Small, direct and unself-conscious, it's the sort of novel that tends to get drowned out amid the noise of today's literature-making machine. But we should all be grateful for stories of this scale, crafted by writers of this skill. ·
Jeff Turrentine is a Washington Post staff writer and a regular reviewer for Book World.
