Body Surfing: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Anita Shreve (Author)
Key Phrases: lobster pound, tank suit, Body Surfing, Anita Shreve, Anna Edwards (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (April 24, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316059854
• ISBN-13: 978-0316059855
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (99 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #303,285 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I enjoyed this Anita Shreve book as much as her other books, July 17, 2007

By	Ratmammy "The Ratmammy" (Ratmammy's Town, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

41 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Shreve Masterpiece, April 25, 2007

By	viktor_57 "viktor_57" (Fairview, Your Favorite State, USA) - See all my reviews

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.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Wait for the paperback..., May 29, 2007

By	D. West "Bones" (Boise, Idaho United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

While I have been fond of other novels by Anita Shreve and she obviously has talent, I do not believe it was fully executed in this book. Indeed, I finished this book because it was a quick read and I did want to find out what was going on between the brothers. To find out that there really wasn't much of anything, that Jeff was simply a jerk and Sydney (supposedly a bright women and a survivor) couldn't figure this out was truly sophomoric. In fact, Jeff's entire courtship of Sydney was so transparent only a very shallow person would have fallen for his routine.

In places, it appeared that Sydney was supposed to represent a strong heroine having weathered some past heartaches, but, she was very thinly drawn and I couldn't bring myself to care too much about her. In fact, I found myself a little put off by her internal musing about other members of the cast, as though she had the inside line on why they were acting certain ways when she didn't have the faintest clue what was going on around her or in her own life (reread some of the dialogue during the initial beach parties and you'll see what I mean). She appeared unable to engage with others in any meaningful conversation, I found her dull and unappealing and rather critical of others for no apparent reason. A lot of her action/reactions went beyond of the stretch of believability for a 29-year old woman.

There was too much in this novel that didn't make sense. For example, we never really understand why Sydney was hired to tutor Julie, (her background doesn't foreshadow this as likely); why none of the family figured out that a tutor wouldn't help Julie get into college; why Mrs. Edwards disliked her so intensely; why Julie turns out to be a lesbian and how it happens that Julie has not shown proclivities towards this penchant and why her family wouldn't notice something of this nature in a creature that appears incapable of deceit; why Sydney would be interested in Jeff; and why, if Sydney thought she was mistreated by Ben during a body surfing incident, doesn't she just confront him?????? In short, there aren't strong plot devices and the book seems ill formed and superfluous. None of the characters are strong or well developed. Even though I liked Julie and Mr. Edwards, I didn't feel as though I understood or knew any of the central characters.

I had hoped Shreve would pull this one out at the end, but alas, the latter half was just as unsatisfying. There was no purpose to Sydney spending time in the unnamed swank hotel, or her traffic accident in order to meet a man who adds nothing to the story. Sydney's final encounter with Mrs. Edwards only serves to confuse and doesn't bring closure to a strained relationship. And Ben's explanation of why Jeff pursued Sydney is so lame; one has to wonder why Shreve bothered to write this novel. As much as I'd like to, I can't glean anything of value from this experience. I had the feeling that Shreve had all these characters and situations left over from other novels that she didn't use and she flung them all into this novel without purpose, direction, or point. Let's hope the next one is better. Shreve is turning out to be a very uneven writer. This book would have benefited greatly from better editing. Next time I'll read the reviews before I purchase the book.