Rising Tide

UNABLE TO ignore the biography of the author, you pick up the book eagerly. The woman on the back cover graduated from your high school only four years before you did. She's 24 years old. She's just gotten a novel published by Knopf.

You can't help it. You seethe with jealousy. She has just fulfilled your innermost fantasy. So you open the book your face set in a prearranged sneer, ready and expecting to find the work a painfully self-conscious first novel. "It's bound to be maudlinly autobiographical," you reassure yourself. In fact, you are convinced it will take place in the hallways of your old school, it does nothing of the sort. It proves to be breathtaking--and by the 30th page you have even forgotten your envious venom.

Full of bizarre images and powerful, if tortured emotions, Fernanda Eberstadt's Low Tide is well worth the read. It is the tale of Jezebel, a 19-year-old Manhattanite, and the two sons of her father's oldest friend. The latter pair are located in England where they squander their fabulous wealth in unimaginable ways.

Casimir, the younger brother, is a harmless buccaneer type who wants nothing more than a toreador suit. Devastatingly good looking and basically warm-hearted, he at least posesses a modicum of stability. His brother Jem, however, is a changeling--half monk, half libertine, vacillating wildly between desperate passion and asceticism. The favoured child of an impressive Mexican woman who died when he was younger and nearly dragged him with her, Jem is, to put it mildly, disturbed. Jezebel, despite being uprooted and a bit lost herself, remains probably the most sane of the trio. She spends the summer with her father in England only to become entangled in a consuming, obsessive passion which is split between Casimir and Jem.

Far more interesting than the plot, however, is the background Eberstadt provides for each character, the fleeting situations, and the host of minor characters with their quick and pointed dialogue. She has a flair for constructing detailed, exotic scenarios which somehow manage to seem plausible without losing any of their fantastical quality. Each character is more eccentric than the fast, but instead of seeking like stylized brats seeking to be unconventional, they appear completely natural in their pursuit of oddities. Instead of pretension one finds rich, imaginative episodes, bordering on fantasy.

The prose itself is rich and carefully crafted, and it includes some amazing turns of phrase which must be read in context to be fully appreciated. Along the way there are a series of (apercus) of varying profundity. Eberstadt is an accute observer of the intellectual and social snobbery which prevails among the wealthy young. Mocking the common assumption that to be sophisticated is to be blase, unflappable, Jem says, "It's not glamorous not to be shocked. It's autistic." (The pun on artistic should not be lost on those who have ever tried this route to social chic.) He continues

You shouldn't just be off, like a television set. Perhaps you're frightened of seeming judgmental, along with everyone else these days. Well it's a piece of dangerous lunacy, this new prohibition against morality.

It's a point well made.

Even if the parody of the Long Island scene has been done before it remains humorous, perhaps benefitting from Eberstadt's youthful vantage point. This vantage point, however, is one of the novel's few flaws. Most of the story is told by Jezebel, but it is unclear how old she is. Sometimes she makes remarks only the dowdily middle-aged should try to get away with, while at other, moments she demonstrates the lack of perspective characteristic of an adolescent on a hormonal jag. Nonetheless, this flaw does not severely impede the novel, which becomes a wild string of events culminating in a furiously paced race through Mexico as Jem and Jezebel flee home and family for the jungle estate where Jem's mother was born.

At this point, the novel assumes all the surrealistic proportions of a Latin American novel. Much of the book, in fact, has the quality of being oversized, larger than life. Pain and desperation loom hellishly large yet remain real enough so that they can hurt and relieve at once. There is something enormously energetic and liberating about a book that teeters on the edge of familiar life and grandiose invention. Knopf claims "Eberstadt is a writer to watch." Even more, she is a writer to read.