Customer Reviews

How Far Is the Ocean from Here: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Susannah Prue agreed to serve as a surrogate mother to wealthy Kit and Julian Forsythe, but in the trimester of her pregnancy, she changes her mind and flees. Now "hugely pregnant" Susannah takes refuge at the dilapidated Thunder Lodge motel owned by the elderly Garlands who generally know why a big pregnant big city girl chooses to fall of the map and be buried on the Texas-New Mexico desert.

Susannah finds the other guests and the owner Marlan, who calls her Susie Q, and his family as desperate to hide from the world or at least someone like she is. She makes friends with the owners' mentally impaired teenage son Tim and Alabamian Dicey and her niece Frank. Now Susannah is going to give birth any day, but has no idea what to do about her child, but knows what she does not desire, the disinterested Forsythe couple raising her baby.

The residents of Thunder Lodge are a terrific fully developed eccentric group who forge a family of sorts; on the other hand Kit and Julian are stereotypes of the idle rich with no purpose in life except hedonism. Julian sums it up when he suggests to Kit they should redecorate their home instead of raising a child while Susannah is already carrying. Still this is a profound character study focusing on the human need for love and belonging with others by answering the deep philosophical title question.

Harriet Klausner

Susannah Pruh is a surrogate, runaway, very soon-to-be delivered young woman, whose car dies at the Thunder Lodge in the desert somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Maybe Texas, I forget. This unusual first novel involves the relationships between Susannah, the surrogate parents, the motel owners and their mentally disabled teenaged son, and an aunt and niece combo who are the only other guests at the motel.

This is literary fiction about folks who are mostly flawed through no fault of their own. Genetics and the cycle of bad parenting for some. Others are just trying to figure things out, to get to a better place in their lives. Hoping that something good will happen to them. Sometimes getting a little mixed up when they try too hard to make it happen and the hormones and heat have obviously fried their brains. Stressful situations abound for all. I would be surprised if it were by chance that it's the youngest person in the novel who seems to have his act together the most.

But what I liked best about the novel were simply the words. Ah, the beautifully, well-chosen words. You frequently get that in a first novel and this one has them in spades. As soon as our surrogate couple gets out of Chicago, Illinois scared them. The sun elbows through the clouds. The sky lowered like a disappointed forehead. The suitcases' tousled entrails fell out.

The book walks a fine line between seriousness and comic relief. The author must be quite witty and so lets her characters be too. But it is a dark novel as well. I would love to express a few thoughts about the ending but, of course, can't. I'll just say that the 2nd half of the book, I believe, is the stronger half.

It comes with a book discussion guide and this would be a great one for book clubs. Now that I'm a retired librarian I should really find the time to join one! So many fine books . . . and such a finite time we have. Enjoy this one - it's a fine ride across the desert and still pretty far to the ocean when you don't know if you're ready to sink or swim.

On a recent road trip to southeastern New Mexico, derelict or run-down motels and cafes whizzed past the window, interrupting my view of the mesas and horizon. These buildings and businesses were mysteriously erected between small towns or just outside them with seemingly little to offer weary travelers. Yet, because I had just read Amy Shearn's excellent debut, HOW FAR IS THE OCEAN FROM HERE, they also held a strange promise of transformation and healing solitude.

Susannah Prue is a young woman in danger of disappearing. She feels unseen and unknown by even those closest to her. She makes the radical decision to become a surrogate mother in order to do something and feel something. But, just weeks before her due date, she disappears on purpose, jumping into her car and traveling southwest, heading to the ocean, and finally finding herself --- literally and later figuratively --- at the Thunder Lodge, an empty motel in the middle of the New Mexican desert.

Run by the gruff and long isolated Marlon and Char, the motel proves an uneasy refuge for Susannah, a place she means to be only a temporary home. Soon she falls into a routine, watching the highway and spending time with the couple's strange son Tim. Susannah is attracted by Tim's beauty and simplicity, and she willfully ignores his disability, causing Marlon, and especially Char, much distress. But Susannah is also distressed, and wounded, and must decide quickly what she wants to do. It is only a matter of time before Julian and Kit, the biological and legal parents of the baby she is carrying, find her hiding at the Thunder Lodge.

Julian and Kit are the successful couple who, from all appearances, have everything that Susannah does not. But their inability to conceive a child has led them to their uneasy relationship with Susannah. While Kit deals deep-seeded suspicions and jealousies, Julian finds himself attracted to Susannah, and they begin to spend time together secretly. As the baby grows inside Susannah it becomes harder to define the boundaries of their relationship, and Susannah finds it more difficult to emotionally come to terms with surrogacy. Often childlike and simple herself, the Thunder Lodge and the surrounding desert provide empty space and ample time for much-needed adult contemplation. It is interrupted only by her fascination with Tim and the arrival of an intriguing pair of travelers who also seem at a crossroads in life.

HOW FAR IS THE OCEAN FROM HERE is the story of longing --- for freedom, peace, love and belonging to something greater than oneself. The tone is at once conversational and completely literary. There is a timelessness, not quite old-fashioned, in the author's phrasing that makes the story lovely and surprising to read. The characters are quirky without being caricatures. They are not always likable, yet their stories, as individuals and as parts of the larger novel, are compelling.

Amy Shearn's first work of fiction is nothing short of marvelous; beautifully written with a well-crafted plot and an interesting set of characters, it is at once witty, hopeful and heartbreakingly sad. This tale of life and death, change and possibility, love, friendship and the search for one's true self is highly recommended. It has the stark and unusual beauty, brutal honesty and seductive rhythms of the southwestern landscape in which it is set.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

Unfortunately, believable characters took a back seat to Shearn's flowery writing in this bizarre trip across the country for a surrogate mother. The characters were all idiosyncratic, which I don't mind, but I never felt like I understood enough about them for their choices to make any sense. Shearn included many well-written (in a beautiful language sort of way) personal details about each character, sure, but the details never fit together to make one believable character. For instance, throughout much of the book, Julian was presented as sensitive, intuitive, and kind. It was jarring when he would suddenly be shown to be completely removed from an emotional situation with thoughts about fishing. Was he truly longing for his first known biological link to another human being, or did he really just need to take a wood working class?

The plot also got so outlandish I almost couldn't take it. (SPOILER) Does Shearn honestly expect readers to believe that a woman who KIDNAPS 2 minors won't be pursued by police because she hasn't yet been gone for 24 hours?

The only reason I stuck with this book until the end was that it was being read in daily installments on our local public radio station during my drive time.

In this strange and vibrant novel where surrogate mother Susannah Prue escapes from Chicago to a remote outpost in the Texas/New Mexico desert, How Far is the Ocean from Here proves there is no such thing as fate. With a story with characters that bound off each other like "particles in atoms and like buoys in a lake," Susannah is just as surprised as Marlon Garland and his crotchety wife Char, the elderly owners of the remote Thunder Lodge Motel to stranded in this remote place, "a godforsaken fleabag motel" while almost boiling over with a strange mix of confusion and false expectations along with all of the misinterpretations of her life back in Chicago.

Unfortunately, Susannah has been tormented by intransigence, the most pressing of which is how to navigate her way out of the thorny world of Julian and Kit Forsythe, a yuppie couple whose baby she has been carrying. Following Susannah's agreement to be a surrogate, it is clear that life for Julian and Kit had become a little complicated, the pregnancy only adding tensions to many of the issues that were already plaguing their stressful marriage. While the willful and self-centered Kit had steadily begun to suffocate Susannah, it was Julian who seemed to suffer most, battling his increasing attraction to Susannah while also plagued by self-doubt over his ability to be a successful father. Meanwhile, he's forced to constantly humor his wife, trying to appease Kit's increasingly erratic and diva-like ways.

It's not surprising then, that Susannah seeks to escape this murky mix of Julian and Kit's perfect life, taking off for the desert, reacting with distain at Kit's fawning motherhood, her energetic crushing concern as she seeks to impose her vision of the world so oppressively. And then there was Julian's ever-increasing - and sometimes sexual - attentions. Ironically, it is at the Thunder Lodge where much of the background drama of this novel plays out as Susannah, hot and tired, stranded and alone, finds herself becoming entangled with Tim, Car and Marlon's handsome but mentally challenged son, who collects pebbles and vegetation constantly swims in the grotto, a heavily chlorinated pool, a rectangle of brackish water rafted with bugs that lies in the back of the motel. With Susannah's defenses down, the sheltered Tim, constantly hidden in a kind of fog, ironically becomes one of the most important people in Susannah's life, along with fellow guest, eleven-year-old Frankie, who hides her gender confusion even as she spats with her aunt Dicey.

As Susannah, Frankie and Tim - and even Dicey - form a confusing and sometimes shaky friendship, it is Susannah, Frankie and Tim who are the confused outsiders and who become the consummate rebels, embarking on a miniature road trip to taste the freedom that has been long denied them. Meanwhile, Julian and Kit are intent to track Susannah down and eventually find her, this "bookstore clerk without a boyfriend or a husband or anything better to do than to carry some strangers' child." With her heart screaming in her chest, Susannah has thrown away too much and too many things that she suddenly wants back. Reckless and free-spirited, she realizes that if she lives by a different set of rules, she would keep west and head towards the coast. Certainly Julian and Kit would never be able to find her in all that fog.

As the highway roars like an ocean, with the thundering sky and the threat of certain rain always hanging over the proceedings, Amy Shearn delves deep into the inner lives of all of her characters, encapsulating all of their hopes and dreams and insecurities while rendering their plight amongst the stark beauty and some of the most vivid images of the American South West. The author's depictions of Susannah's failings are precise and intimate, and brutally honest. Like all of the other characters she's stuck in an impossible conundrum, a girl terrified of becoming a young mother, the isolation of Thunder Lodge itself a powerful symbol for her predicament. Meanwhile, Julian finds himself questioning his loyalties to Kit, and from the outset, it is obvious that all of their lives will converge at this ramshackle motel and come to a dreaded climax, a climax that involves the strange fates of Tim, and of Frankie, who still so desperately wants to be a boy even though she's biologically half a girl. Susannah's assignation with her fate hundreds of miles across the country eventually propels How Far is the Ocean From Here as does her desperate need to connect to something other than the stark realities that steadily encapsulate this dry and parched land of perpetual heat. Reminiscent of the famous play Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmie Dean Jimmie Dean, this unusually complex and exotic this tale is all about the outsider and how he/she can be so often paralyzed by fear and unable to move ahead. In the end, it is only through forgiveness and acceptance that Susannah, Julian and Kit - and the Garlands - are hopefully able to forge ahead, united in hope and buttressed against fear. Mike Leonard November 08.

This book was read on *chapter a Day* on public radio and I just HAD to get it ....very descriptive and unique, I liked it very much

This is a crazy book! I don't know how to say it better. The plot is completely implausible, the characters are all a bit out-there, and yet it all comes together in this amazing way that keeps you turning pages. I really can't say what it is about this book I love, just that I enjoyed it. Usually, I am not a fan of books with unrealistic plots, and I'm also not a fan of characters that I cannot identify with. And yet, while I could never get on board with anything any of these characters were doing, I still wanted to go along for the ride.

I had few complaints about this book, but there are some things that may bother a reader. The POV shifts around - sometimes from a character to another and back again in one paragraph. This caused me to have to reread some parts once I figured out who's POV we were coming from. This is especially confusing in the last chapter. And speaking of the ending, I wasn't sure I was too enthused about this one. It was okay. At first it's just sad (though I see the author's purpose), and then almost a bit sugar-coated (maybe to make up for it?). Would have been better without the last page (which brings up a million "how did this come to be?" questions). The book is 5 stars, the ending maybe only 3.

Also, like I said, you're just going to have to read this book with an open mind because it is pretty far-fetched. But despite that, the characters seem real. It was unbelievable yet believable.

Over all I highly recommend this! I didn't think it was my type of book but I enjoyed it anyway. It did leave me with some questions (I never understood the paranormal part, why was it there? What does it mean?), but I suppose that's not an all-out bad thing. Looking forward to more from this author.

The characters in this book will stay with me for a long time. As other reviewers have noted, the language is a joy to read. The story takes place in an unexpected oasis in the desert. Lost souls looking for an anchor find each other and their lives change in unexpected ways. Former lives are left behind and new ties are forged in a story filled with love, mistakes, friendship and digging for the essence of one's being.

Read this book. One of my favorites of all time. I hope Amy Shearn writes more novels as beautiful as this one.

Author seems to be free associating. Sorry, I can't waste my time to finish something like this when there's so many great & wonderful books yet to read.