A Seahorse Year: A Novel [Hardcover]

Stacey D'Erasmo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 12, 2004

Stacey D'Erasmo's new novel, following the highly acclaimed Tea, is a powerful and beautiful book about a pivotal year in the life of a quintessentially modern family. In contemporary San Francisco, an extended family is transformed by the emerging breakdown of a troubled adolescent boy. The lives of those who love Christopher -- his mother, Nan; her lover, Marina; his gay father, Hal; and Christopher's loyal girlfriend, Tamara -- are pushed to the edge by something new in him that mystifies them all. When he runs away, far into the woods of nothern California, their assumptions about themselves and one another are sorely tested. They might not, they discover, be quite so modern as they once thought. Even the dried seahorses on Marina's windowpane rattle unnervingly as if to announce a time like no other.
In precise, lyrical language, A Seahorse Year explores love at the limits of bearability. It is wise about the things we do out of love that often have both redemptive and disastrous consequences. Difficult questions that have all the tough complexity of real life are asked; devastating truths are revealed in the answers.
Michael Cunningham described Tea as "pure and profound, a ravishing book." A Seahorse Year is an even richer, more luminous achievement.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

D'Erasmo's quiet, penetrating second novel (after Tea) follows a San Francisco family coping with a 16-year-old son's mental illness. Christopher's mom, Nan, is in a long-term relationship with girlfriend Marina, who's like another mom; his sperm donor dad, Hal, is gay, a dancer-turned-CPA. But despite the unconventional setup, his parents sometimes act with the confused stiffness of the most traditional of families. When Christopher runs away the first time, Nan is distraught; she explains that her son had "a freak-out, we think. He wouldn't wash, he was angry all the time, he was saying all sorts of strange stuff, and he just, he just wasn't Christopher." After Christopher is fetched home, he's diagnosed with schizophrenia; Nan, meanwhile, is grasping at connection, and Marina's sleeping with someone else. D'Erasmo portrays Christopher's strange thoughts with beauty and insight; his misguided girlfriend, Tamara, is also tenderly, convincingly rendered. The family's unsettled state adds to the complications, as Christopher nearly kills himself and then escapes, with Tamara's help, from a mental health facility. As D'Erasmo shifts between different points of view—distinct, but united by her lush prose—she paints a portrait of illness, but also of growth and change.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Christopher, a 16-year-old San Franciscan, is missing, and his parents--Hal, an accountant, and Nan, a bookstore owner--are frantic. As is Marina, a painter and Nan's live-in lover. As this high-strung trio search their souls for clues to sweet Christopher's inexplicable disappearance, D'Erasmo reverses time to reveal that Nan and Hal, who is also gay, barely knew each other when she decided that she wanted to have a child. Neither could have predicted just how loving a father Hal would be, just as they never could have imagined that their son would end up suffering from the most diabolical of illnesses, schizophrenia. In her sterling debut, Tea (1999), D'Erasmo explored the repercussions of a mother's suicide. Here, in an even more refined and hard-hitting tale, she maps the ripple effect of a loved child's mental illness on adults already coping with complex emotional predicaments. Marina is unfaithful; Hal is lonely; and Nan is terrified, enraged, and heroic. Fluent in the subtlest of psychological states and gloriously visual in her resonant descriptions of everything from table settings to a redwood forest, D'Erasmo composes scenes of both high drama and grinding everydayness to form a supple yet piercing novel of obdurate individuality, inescapable aberration, and oceanic love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; New title edition (July 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618439234
• ISBN-13: 978-0618439232
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,096,565 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

STACEY D'ERASMO is the author of the novels Tea, a New York Times Notable Book, and A Seahorse Year, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year and a Lambda Literary Award winner. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Ploughshares. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, she is currently an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University. She lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "But love or something is not only deaf, but mute", August 17, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Seahorse Year: A Novel (Hardcover)

Set in a trendy, latte drinking enclave of San Francisco, A Seahorse Year is an absolutely beautifully written novel that tackles the subject of mental illness from a pretty unique point of view. By portraying a strikingly contemporary family - two lesbian mums and a gay dad - D'Erasmo has probably single handedly discounted many of the myths associated with gay and lesbian parenting. If nothing else, A Seahorse Year indomitably shows that gay and lesbian parents are really not that different from straight parents.

The subject of teenage mental illness is the focus of this story with the narrative centering around five main characters. Christopher, Nan and Hal's teenage son is mentally ill and has recently gone missing. Nan and Hal are both gay and live separately, but are unequivocally devoted to Chris, each sharing parental responsibility. Nan's longtime partner, Marina, has been having an affair with Shiloh, a younger woman and is unable to break away from Shiloh but also unable to stay with her. Hal meets Dan and Dan forces Hal to come to terms with a middle age that seems miles away from his promiscuous past as a member of the glam-rock band Venus Flytrap. Neither parent is prepared for the discovery that Christopher has developed an acute case of schizophrenia.

The only person who seems to understand Christopher is his classmate and girlfriend, Tamara, but even this unique rapport - via the music of PJ Harvey - does not offer shortcuts to treatment and healing. The fragile family must find ways to cope, but each member encounters many stretches of solitude - told via internal monologue - between sporadic moments of connection. Nan feels as though she's spent her whole life "crashing into dark forests after love. She alone has done the questing and the tracking." And as the story goes on, she realizes that Christopher is endurably her life and her passion. Hal has a conservative streak and is devoted to his profession but he questions his success as a father, while also wondering about his ability to settle down with a man such as Dan. Marina is relegated to the periphery of the group - "an unhappy, bored and cruddy person," unable to help Chris or communicate with Nan, she seeks solace in the arms of Shiloh. Chris is isolated with his illness, "living in two elements at once: the now and the possible."

At first glance, A Seahorse Year may seem steeped in melodramatics, but in reality, the novel has a psychological complexity and a lyrical beauty, which yields no easy answers on the questions of love and family dysfunction. There's also the deeper theme of the transformation of the counterculture: San Francisco, the city of free love becomes the city of the bourgeois as parents Hal and Nan act and react to Chris's illness just like a conventional married straight couple. D'Erasmo alternatively dips into the rich inner lives of the five characters, and, at times, this causes the narrative to become a little cluttered. But generally, the author manages to offer strong voices with insights into the nature love and acceptance that are emotionally spot-on. Mike Leonard August 04.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a rare find, December 11, 2005

By 

Rachel Cline "writer-reader-brooder" (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Seahorse Year (Paperback)

This is the kind of book that comes along so infrequently--a truly insightful, empathic, lovingly crafted look at the real stuff of life: relationships, identity, culture, our place in the world... all that. D'erasmo's voice struck me as utterly transparent. Although I admired her use of language from time to time, I never had the feeling I was being pushed or prodded along in my thinking, only that I was discovering this peculiarly vivid (and vividly peculiar) little nexus of individuals as they were--as they are, even, because they are still alive for me. It's not uplifting, or side-splittingly funny, but if you read novels for all those other reasons that many of us do and can't articulate, this is a tremendously worthwhile book.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars good base to story, flags somewhat as goes on, good close, March 28, 2005

By 

B. Capossere (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Seahorse Year: A Novel (Hardcover)

A Seahorse Year sounds from its premise as if it's trying a bit too hard: lesbian mother raised in abusive household raising about-to-be-diagnosed-with-schizophrenia adolescent son with the help of his gay searching-for-love dad and her lesbian searching-for-love-and-herself lover/artist. All set in San Fran of course. And at times, it is true that it does strain a bit. But perhaps the most endearing and insightful aspect of Seahorse is that amid this scattershot collection of "modern family" lies the same old pitfalls, fear, flaws, jealousies, bravery, compassion, and love as lies in the "traditional" family.
The book starts a few days into Christopher's having run off, the first concrete sign of his worsening illness. As they cope together and individually with his disappearance, we are introduced one by one to:
his mother Nan--gay, confused and guilt-ridden over Christopher's disappearance, angry over her lover's still supposedly secret affair, and with only a small family support system of her own due to her abusive childhood raising.
Marina--Nan's longtime partner, an artist struggling for years to capture the "true" Tree image she paints non-stop and to find just what her life is up to, including her relationships with Nan, Nan's son, Christopher's father, and Shiloh--the much younger girl she is cheating on Nan with.
Hal--Christopher's father, a well-off gay accountant semi-famous at one time for his role in an extravagant gay stage show. A man of numbers and a man who is falling in love even while his other life falls apart.
Christopher--the son who runs away, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, then is put through a series of treatments, all of which "work", though the cost to self is always a question.
Tamara--Christopher's girlfriend who sees him perhaps more clearly than others, though whether this is true or not is later held up for scrutiny.

We follow the family through Christopher's first disappearance, his diagnosis, several treatment regimens, and another more dramatic disappearance. The perspective shifts among the main characters and while the shifts are handled smoothly, they sometimes happen so frequently over so brief a time that the book feels somewhat cluttered so that the reader loses some sense of story and character because so much is going on. Some streamlining of sidestories, perhaps some more time spent in each perspective would have helped.
The sense of desolation, confusion, anger and resentment the situation creates is clearly and realistically conveyed. The characters are not saints. They are human beings and act both compassionately and selflessly and juvenile and selfishly in turn. And their lives, though they may revolve around Christopher and his illness during this time, do not stop moving in other areas.
At times, as mentioned before, the book seems to strain a bit in its plot and sometimes in its language--story turns that seem a bit contrived for sake of complexity or further drama, images that echo a bit too patly what is happening in the story. These flaws don't happen regularly enough to ruin the book, but enough so they are noted several times throughout. The story seems to run down a bit as well in the latter part, and while it picks up again, the more forceful narrative flow is sometimes overly dramatic as situations and characters start to turn somewhat unbelievable. But that part is over quickly and the end returns to a more realistic, quiet, and character-driven story. The end, in fact, with its ambiguity and its shaded resolutions (as opposed to a nice wrapped up happy ending) is one of the book's highlights.
Others are the relationship between Tamara and Christopher, which is beautifully depicted, and the view from Christopher's mind, which conveys not simply the sorrow and terror of mental illness, but also a more, perhaps "positive" isn't the right word but a side that is less filled with sorrow and terror but which offers a slant view of the world that has at times its own beauty.
Finally, the idea of whether you can truly "know" someone, or even yourself, is examined throughout all the book's interactions in full, complex, and moving fashion. Each must find their own way of answering that question and the author is true enough to her characters to let the answers, if they are found at all, differ.
Overall, a book with some noticeable flaws and one that would be helped by some streamlining, but also one that has a strong story at its center and a few good characters to carry the story's weight. Recommended.