Passion

~ Fortune Rocks, by Anita Shreve ~

This is one of Shreve’s older novels and I confess I was not expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. It is also about double the length of most of her other novels – but so good a read was it I could have wished it doubled again. The first section of the novel features the 15 year old Olympia Biddeford, at the very cusp of the transformation from girl to woman, and Shreve’s writing powerfully infuses these passages with sensuality.

In the time it takes for her to walk from the bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune’s Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire. Desire that slows the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence, that focuses the gaze absolutely on the progress of naked feet walking toward the water. This firs brief awareness of desire – and of being the object of desire, a state of which she has had no previous hint, comes to her as a kind of slow seizure, as of air compressing itself all around her, and causes what seems to be the first faint shudder of her adult life

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Thus does Shreve begin this novel, with Olympia’s budding self development, and in the first section of the novel, everything to do with and around Olympia is drenched in sensuality. The sensuality comes in part from Shreve’s careful descriptions of Olympia’s clothes, movements, sensations, but also partly in part from her transgressions – walking barelegged, going to the beach during the men’s hours (this novel begins in 1899), being watched by so many men and boys and relishing the admiring attention. Even her feet

create slight and scandalous indentations in the sand. Her dress, which is a peach silk, turns, when she steps into the water, a translucent sepia. The air is hot, but the water on her skin is frigid; and the contrast makes her shiver

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Olympia’s every movement is both deliberate and yet not, both sensuous and yet innocent, knowing and yet only part-knowing. In all she does, there is something titillating and provocative and yet disingenuous. Shreve perfectly captures this dangerous precipice of the dawning of sexual awareness of a 15 year old, precocious in mind and body.

It is a time of such vulnerability and tenderness, as Olympia is eager to embrace everything.

As the children take in the lawn and the rocks and the sea and then the young woman who is approaching them, they have about them an expression Olympia recognizes from herself the previous day: a nearly frenzied inhaling of the first stingingly heady breaths of summer.

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It is Shreve’s choice of words that render the sensuality in the narrative, lending a slightly giddy, overwhelming sensation to the reader who identifies with that summer of Olympia’s.

Spoiler alert: The story unfolds beautifully with Olympia meeting her father’s friend, Dr John Haskell, his beautiful and very lovely wife, Catherine, their 4 children. John and Olympia are helplessly in thrall to each other from the moment they lay eyes on each other. Their situation is of course an impossible one, for all the obvious reasons. Nevertheless, they defy everything – family, personal commitments, societal norms – to embark on an affair which, because it remains steadfast all their lives, Shreve renders respectable and not at all trivial, sordid or lust-fuelled. John and Olympia both pay dearly for such a breach of everything their society holds dear.

The subsequent sections of the novel do not diminish in interest or intensity. After some travails, Olympia returns to Fortune’s Rocks, herself only 20 years old, to fight for custody of her son who has been placed in foster care. The fight inadvertently takes on the ‘Franco’ community of the mills, the working classes, the wretched conditions in which they struggle to live and work. Shreve’s magic holds to the very end – a sudden end – a very swift but satisfying wrap up of all these tangled threads.

Olympia is not unlike some of Shreve’s other protagonists – she loves where she is forbidden to love; the love is not a flash-in-the-pan, but deep and abiding and a life-long passion which cannot be deterred; a love which they recklessly perform but which is not only about lust; so too did Shreve’s other protagonists such as Grace in The Stars are Fire love the pianist, or Mary Amesbury in Strange Fits of Passion love Jack Strout, the lobster fisherman, or Sian and Charles in When and Where who meet again after more than 3 decades apart and are hopelessly in love still.

Olympia often thinks about desire – desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence – and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul

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Shreve seems to delight in writing women protagonists gifted with a remarkable ability for passion and that talent of giving themselves with generosity and fearlessness, to that passion.