Product Description

"Always readable-sometimes compulsively so-Shreve's novels are typically emotionally resonant, nicely paced, and populated by memorable characters." -People

At the age of 29, Sydney has already been once divorced and once widowed. Trying to regain her footing, she has signed on to tutor the teenage daughter of a well-to-do couple as they spend a sultry summer in their oceanfront New Hampshire cottage.

But when the Edwardses' two grown sons arrive at the beach house, Sydney finds herself caught up in a destructive web of old tensions and bitter divisions. As the brothers vie for her affections, the fragile existence Sydney has rebuilt is threatened.

With the subtle wit, lyrical language, and brilliant insight into the human heart that has led her to be called "an author at one with her métier" (Miami Herald), Shreve weaves a novel about marriage, family, and the supreme courage it takes to love.

"Shreve excels at nuance and detail. She skillfully illuminates the tiniest of moments, offering readers a peek at the complex undertones coursing through the characters throughout the story." -Rocky Mountain News

"There is something satisfyingly clean, well functioning, pale, and delicious about an Anita Shreve novel. . . . Shreve's characters, grappling with desire, juggling their shame against their regret, are entirely welcome." -Boston Globe

"Shreve's writing is textured, reflective, and generally flows with ease, to the point where the reader may be surprised at how quickly the pages turn."-Newsday

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #449020 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-15
• Released on: 2008-01-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780316067331
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
The beach house in New Hampshire which figured in Anita Shreve's The Pilot's Wife, Fortune's Rocks, and Sea Glass is once again featured in Body Surfing. This time, it is the summer home of the Edwards family, Anna and Mark and daughter Julie. Mrs. Edwards has great hopes for Julie, who is "slow," so she hires Sydney to tutor her, in preparation for her senior year. There are two older brothers, Jeff and Ben, whose arrival changes the household dynamic considerably.

Once again, Shreve revisits the minefield of love and betrayal that she has explored so well in her best novels. Sydney is 29, twice married, once divorced, and once a widow. She is floundering, not sure she wants to go back to school, accepting whatever job comes along and then moving on. She answers the ad for a tutor and finds herself in the Edwards household, where she discovers that Julie has undiscovered artistic talent. Mrs. Edwards dislikes her instantly, is dismissive, and treats her like a servant. Mr. Edwards befriends her, shows her his roses and talks to her about the history of the house, giving the reader a rundown of the role the house has played in prior novels.

Sydney, Jeff, and Ben go body surfing late one night and Sydney is sure that Ben has tried to grope her underwater. She takes immediate umbrage at this and treats him coldly thereafter. Shreve's other work has a steady narrative flow, but this novel is episodic and disjointed. There is the the arrival of Jeff's girlfriend, her departure, an evening when Julie comes home drunk and won't talk about it, and a liaison between Sydney and Jeff which leads to the complications that eventually define the novel. There is a twist at the end, involving the brothers, that is divisive, destructive and rather hard to believe.

While this is not Shreve's best effort, because the characters are not well-defined, it is worth reading her take on what happens to people when they compete for love. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly
Deceptive love and stark betrayal form the icy core of this dark 12th novel from Oprah-anointed (The Pilot's Wife), Orange Prize finalist (The Weight of Water) Shreve. Set adrift at 29 by the sudden death of her second husband (her first divorced her), smart, underemployed Sydney (no last name) signs on for a quiet New England oceanfront summer of tutoring 18-year-old Julie, the intellectually slow but artistically talented and strikingly beautiful daughter of the fractious Edwards clan. The family includes Julie's brothers—35-year-old Boston corporate real estate man Ben and 31-year-old M.I.T. poli-sci professor Jeff—and the three children's parents. Sydney is half-Jewish, and Mrs. Edwards is anti-Semitic. Family tensions escalate when Julie disappears, then resurfaces in Montreal as the lesbian lover of 25-year-old Helene (a body surfer who frequented the beach near the Edwardses' home). Jeff and Sydney bond during their search for Julie, nights of passion leading to plans for a joyous wedding, which get very complicated when the couple returns to Edwards central. Shreve's devastating depiction of the family's dissolution—the culmination of sublimated jealousies suddenly exploding into the open—is wrenching. Shreve's omniscience is asserted with such ease that it often feels like she's toying with her characters, but her control is masterful, particularly in the sure-handed and compassionate aftermath. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Suzanne Berne

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.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

I enjoyed this Anita Shreve book as much as her other books
BODY SURFING by Anita Shreve
July 17, 2007

Amazon Rating: 4/5 stars

Anita Shreve has to be one of my favorite authors, and BODY SURFING is yet another book I enjoyed immensely. It takes place in the same location as several of her previous books, notably FORTUNE'S ROCKS, and SEA GLASS. Compared to most of her other novels, BODY SURFING takes place in more contemporary times, so it has a different feel than the others. I wasn't sure I would enjoy this one because of it. However, I found that once I got into the story, I was enjoying it as much as I had FORTUNE'S ROCKS and SEA GLASS. Shreve has a wonderful way with words, and this book was no exception. It's what makes her books that much more of an experience.

29-year old Sydney is tutoring a young woman for the summer, a woman with a noticeable learning disability. She is slow, but her parents have high hopes that she will be able to further her education with some help from Sydney. Sydney is to live with the Edwards family, who are summering on the New Hampshire coast in a beach house, a very lovely location that plays as an important a part to the story as the characters do. Sydney's background is that she has been married twice now, and is at the age of 29 a widow. She is still trying to recover from the shock of losing her beloved husband, when she arrives at the summer home.

Not too long after she's moved in, the two grown sons also show up for the weekend. Ben and Jeff are two very different men. Jeff is a professor and Ben is in real estate. Sydney connects with Jeff, and finds herself pulled into his affections faster than she can blink an eye. It is during a secretive romp in the waters one night when Ben, Jeff and Sydney steal away, during which a rather awkward moment in the water occurs that somehow leads Sydney to bond closer to Jeff, thinking Ben had come on to her in a very lascivious way. She is appalled at Ben's actions toward her, and she tries her best to avoid him.

The summer progresses and Jeff and Sydney's relationship moves forward rather quickly. But it's not the relationship that is important, but what is really going on in Jeff's mind, as well as Ben's, while the relationship advances. What appears on the surface is not what is going on underneath.

At the same time, there is a subplot centering on the younger sister. Julie, who bonds with Sydney and blossoms under her tutelage, proves that she has hidden talents that her parents would never nurture, but Sydney, who realizes that Julie may never excel in the traditional courses in school, tries to find other talents that may help Julie survive as an adult. In the mean time, Julie is starting to develop into a very beautiful woman, and the local boys are starting to notice her. Sydney cannot understand why Julie's parents are totally blind to this fact, to the point where they are not even aware that their daughter has been going out on her own without the family knowing.

Sydney's relationships with the family members, outside of that with Jeff, are crucial to the story. She is the outsider, welcomed by most of the family except for Mrs. Edwards, who sees Sydney as someone who is disrupting their lives and is only to be spoken to as the hired help.

Anita Shreve's novels often have these surprise endings, and this was the case with BODY SURFING. I knew there was something "big" that was going to be revealed at the end, and it made the book worthwhile. I recommend this book for fans of Anita Shreve as well as those who are looking for a well-written character-driven novel. Intense and beautifully written, BODY SURFING is a book you will not be able to put down.

Another Shreve Masterpiece
I may be a man, and not just a man, but a businessman, and the only times that I am not going over a spreadsheet or quarterly report are when I am on a plane, but that is when I like to prop a cheap airline pillow behind my neck, wrap myself in a thin airline blanket, and dive into the latest Anita Shreve novel.

I usually wrap another dust jacket over the book, something with "Success" or "Winning" in the title, but underneath the fake jacket I am unwrapping the lives, histories, and fates of complicated and compelling characters, and I often finish a Shreve novel in tears at the sheer power of her vivid and powerful descriptions of the turmoil within the human heart, at which point a flight attendant or a fellow passenger will ask if anything's wrong, and I usually reply, "These success/winning/business strategies are just so powerful (sniff)... I can bench 200 pounds."

"Body Surfing: A Novel" continues Shreve's chronicling of the relationships between people seemingly thrown together by chance but whose lives eventually become so intertwined that one feels Fate, or an omniscient author, has brought them together.

Sydney, a young woman escaping her own past, steps into the seemingly idyllic, New Hampshire seaside home of wealthy architect Mr. Edwards. The elegant, two-story, white clapboard house with the wraparound porch and mansard roof has become a recurring character in many of Shreve's novels, and here it serves as the repository of growing resentments, passions, and betrayals as Sydney becomes entangled in the Edwards family slow dissolution.

I fairly dissolved myself as I read of Sydney's growing attraction to one of the Edwards brothers and the bitter actions of the other, all leading to a climax that left me, dare I say it, body surfing--on a wave of overwhelming emotions and uncontrollable feelings.

A book that leaves questions unanswered
It's always a thrill to start reading a book by Anita Shreve. Her writing has a refreshing astringency, like tart lemon sherbet after one scoop too many of rocky road. Every sentence is weighted, and the reader joins the writer in observing and interpreting the action.

BODY SURFING is the story of Sydney Sklar, recently widowed, who is tutoring eighteen-year-old Julie Edwards at a beach house in New Hampshire. Julie's older brothers visit and sparks ignite between Sydney and Jeff.

Now comes the trouble with spare writing: the reader SEES the various love affairs unfolding, but they're hard to fathom. The chemistry has to be taken on faith. The drawing of a finger along a thigh inspires sensual longing? An underwater touch in the dark is received with intractable revulsion? A distant swimmer in a wetsuit arouses a young girl's first sexual passion? We know it because the author tells us so, but it's all a bit abstract. Lives are changed by these minimal encounters but the reader doesn't feel the heat; the plot seems somehow under-explained.

The characters, too, are described by their actions, with interpretation laid on. Somehow you know they're as complex as anyone else but the narrative doesn't quite do that complexity justice. We might wonder why Mrs. Edwards ever thought a summer of tutoring would get her "slow" daughter into a Seven Sisters college; how an architect never came to discover that his daughter is gifted with artistic talent; why neither of them ever noticed that she was a lesbian. And as for Sydney, she seems strong, smart and kind, is already twice-married, yet she can't spot a cad when she sees one and instantly agrees to marry him, apparently because of the thigh-stroking mentioned above.

There's nothing awful about this book; the writing itself is a treat, though maybe better suited to stories with a period setting like SEA GLASS or FORTUNE'S ROCKS. However it's not Anita Shreve's best. If you haven't read her, don't start here. But if you love her style, you'll probably find this book a passable read.