Read an Excerpt

"The only problem with looking for sea glass...is that you never
look up. You never see the view. You never see the houses or the
ocean, because you're afraid you'll miss something in the
sand."

As it is with all of us, the characters in SEA GLASS don't see the
view --- the vista that history paints in time. If they did,
choices would no doubt differ...but therein lies the story. Anita
Shreve has a knack for fashioning compelling fiction from
historical vistas, and SEA GLASS is no exception. The story evolves
over a year's time, beginning several months before the great stock
market crash, an event that acts as a character in much the same
way as the pieces of sea glass that so beguile Honora.

SEA GLASS, Shreve's ninth novel, centers on Honora Beecher, newly
married to Sexton, a traveling typewriter salesman, and three other
characters whose lives eventually intersect. It's 1929 and the
Beechers are beginning their life together in a dilapidated
beachfront house at Fortune's Rocks (a house that dedicated readers
will recognize from THE PILOT'S WIFE and FORTUNE'S ROCKS). In true
Shreve style, the other characters are quickly introduced but are
slowly, albeit inevitably, drawn into the orbit of Honora's life as
she falls in love with the rambling old house and the beach on
which it resides.

Honora lays claim to sparkling glass fragments of heartening color
even as she is buffeted by the disappointment that Sexton is not
the man she believed him to be. As the other characters flow into
her life, Honora comes into her own as she learns more of the
economic and class struggles of the world beyond her sea-swept
sands. 

SEA GLASS layers history and Depression-era economics with the
universality of love, friendship, violence, despair, betrayal, and
hope. It's a dissection of a New England coastal community in hard
times, and the characters Shreve uses as her scalpel are varied and
deep, if not always completely credible. McDermott, a mill worker
who's going deaf, is drawn into a struggle for unionization while
simultaneously becoming a father figure for Alphonse, an
11-year-old whose income from the mills is essential to the
survival of his mother and siblings. Vivian, a wealthy and
dissolute socialite who lives down the beach, provides not only
capitalistic contrast to the poverty and politicization of the
others but occasional welcome comic relief as well.

Anita Shreve brings the New England landscape to life with
descriptions of sea glass and the forces of nature that smooth it.
Mental pictures form of the rocks covering the sand like "thick
fists of gray and brown and black." She's equally adept at
describing the brutal beauty of industrialized life in the mill as
she compares machinery to music, "this note and then that note and
then this note, moving toward a furious crescendo, sounding a
particular beat as the music reaches a fever pitch and then warbles
down to a simple melody." The characters' physical surroundings are
so realistically described, with a fine and unique grace, that it's
easy to forgive the convenient redemptive conversion of Vivian and
the occasional predictability of the plot.

"[Honora] hesitates over a round starburst in the sand, thinking,
despite the season, that it might be a jellyfish. But when she
dares to poke it with her finger, she discovers that it is the
bottom of a crystal goblet, the stem snapped off at the base, the
crystal battered and misshapen, but a treasure nevertheless."