Love on the Rocks

A young widow is torn between two brothers.

(Nick Craine)

BODY SURFING

By Anita Shreve

Little, Brown. 291 pp. $25.99

Over the course of 12 previous books, Anita Shreve has presented her characters with some of life's worst vicissitudes, and Sydney Sklar, the heroine of Body Surfing, is no exception. Once divorced and once widowed by 29, she's deeply shaken, but in a manner so circumspect and stoical that Shreve barely nods at it: "The double blow of the divorce and death left Sydney in a state of emotional paralysis, during which she was unable to finish her thesis in developmental psychology and had to withdraw from her graduate program at Brandeis."

As a way to "drift and heal," Sydney takes a string of "odd jobs," the most recent of which is tutoring beautiful Julie Edwards, a teenage girl with learning disabilities, at her parents' atmospheric beach house on the New Hampshire coast.

The Edwards's house is quickly recognizable as the one featured in three of Shreve's previous novels, Fortune's Rocks, Sea Glass and The Pilot's Wife, so Sydney fits neatly into a long line of troubled women. Not only is she bereaved and divorced, she's estranged from her parents and essentially alone in the world. Plus she's half-Jewish in a WASP enclave that makes the L.L. Bean catalogue look diverse. (Shreve has some fun with preppy stereotypes, such as the guest who "has the studied reticence of a recovering alcoholic surrounded by alcohol.") Sydney's troubles increase with the arrival of Julie's much older brothers, Ben and Jeff, who are both smitten with Sydney the first afternoon when they watch her body-surfing. As she stumbles out of the surf, Jeff greets her with a dry towel, and romantic complications ensue.

One of the pleasures of Shreve's novels is that nothing ever happens simply, especially not affairs of the heart. In this case, Sydney falls for Jeff over Ben, though Ben is single and Jeff is supposed to be marrying the polished Victoria -- adored by his shallow, social-climbing mother. Even this entanglement looks straightforward when docile Julie ties the whole household in knots with an unanticipated romance of her own.

Because Jeff and Sydney become engaged at almost the exact midpoint of the book, one knows that difficulties lurk ahead, all of which Sydney meets gracefully, if somewhat automatically. Her "emotional paralysis" is conveyed in the fragmentary style Shreve has adopted in this novel: Every scene is chopped into short, deadpan segments. The effect of so much white space also highlights the curious detachment both Sydney and Shreve maintain toward Sydney's precarious situation. If only Sydney would swear a few times! Throw a fish fork at someone! But even when subjected to shocking cruelty, she responds with somber wisdom: "She knows now that with time . . . a kind of necessary acceptance will form around her, like a lobster making its new shell, one that will be soft and easily breakable in the beginning but so hard that only lobster crackers can shatter it in the end."

This passage points to what is so alluring and so puzzling about this book: the notion that pain can be borne attractively. Like Sydney, who recovers from a hideous disappointment in an elegant Boston hotel (where she is courted by a suave Italian), the suggestion seems to be that one can look good in misery, be dignified instead of abject. Shreve quite rightly emphasizes the importance of plunging into life bravely again and again, no matter how tumbled one gets by the waves of fate. Unfortunately, people in pain tend to look and act as wretchedly as they feel, and when at last they stumble out of the surf, rarely is anyone smitten with them. Usually the beach is deserted, not a dry towel in sight. ·

Suzanne Berne's most recent novel is "The Ghost at the Table."