Making A Person: Notes On Amy Shearn's How Far Is The Ocean From Here

Maria Fitzgerald once said to me: your thesis will not reflect what you learned in the creative writing MFA. The true leap forward will be the book you write after your thesis.  Reading Amy Shearn’s novel How Far Is The Ocean From Here made it clear to me how big the leap really is.

Amy could have written this description, of a motel room, in graduate school: 
“There was no comfort here. The air conditioner spit musty air. The pine green flocked walls and furniture made to look like dark wood, the ineffective television set, the leprous mirror, the trickle of eggy water from the crusted shower spout.  The scrapey bedclothes.. The too-thick curtains. The room clung around dampish and dark.”

But I don’t think she could have written this book, which follows a truant surrogate mother,  in grad school.  Her characters have solidified and sharpened; they have the pungency of actual people.  The scenes reflect the tricky fractals of conversation and rationalization.

How Far Is the Ocean From Here (hereinafter also HFITOFH) reminded me that technique in fiction is never purely formal, as I naively imagine technique might be “purely formal” in painting or music, because the stuff of fiction is not light or sound but the weirdness of the human heart. If fiction is to be anything but verbal puppetry, then inertia, confusion, and stupidity have to be given their due.

About that weirdness: Writing fiction also requires certain small braveries.  Every iffy thought, every depraved action, every uncool moment has to pass through your head first.  It’s tempting to pull back a little sometimes, but dishonest.   HFITOFH is brave.

The book is also good enough that you can just assume its competence and think about its characters as people, think about its plot as events, and think about its concerns as themes. 

Amy is the laureate of the implicit questions in young women’s voices. Those questions are interesting and resonant.  HFITOFH reminded me of some of David Foster Wallace’s best obiter dicta:  ”Today’s subforties have very different horrors prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of having died without once having loved something more than yourself.”   

How Far Is The Ocean From Here is a generous meditation on selfishness, a book about solipsism, whose form—a third person perforated with other points of view–undermines solipsism. 

The book is set in the southwest, with connections back to Chicago, so, of course. it implicates the Big American Idea of the Frontier. The story both deflates and honors American westward movement:  a frontier means never having to say you’re sorry.    

But ultimately I came back to the characters. I loved them so much that, when something happens to one of them on pages 269-271, I beseeched the author like Abraham beseeching God: “Why?” (Never mind that everything had been carefully set up.)   

What happens on pp. 269-271 sets up the last chapter, which has the elliptical quality of an epilogue and is the only part of the book that raises questions for me.  For a few paragraphs there, at the very end, the characters lose a little bit of their substance and sovereignty and become the servants, rather than the dictators, of form.  I still loved the prose, I still cared about these people.  But the ending struck me,  in its schematics, as unsatisfyingly satisfying.

But then I think: what did I miss? Or misinterpret?   

How Far Is The Ocean From Here is rich enough that I assume I just missed something.  It is rich enough that I will reread it for as long as my eyes can still make out words on a page. 

Comments

[amy]

Thank you for this. What a lovely and thoughtful meditation, just the kind of clear-eyed intelligence I came to expect from you in grad school workshops. And to say my book is brave! This makes my day, K. It makes my year.

[K]

I remembered from an interview you did that you started this in February of our third year, which so impressed me, because I was floundering through my thesis at the time. And I said to myself: why didn't I start something new, but I've since realized: I had two things in the works that i really didn't want to abandoned, that weren't in any sense practice. I've started something new now and I'm eager to keep working on it.

[Mandy]

Ditto. I'm proud to have been in the same program as Shearn because she makes us look good. Plus, I'm proud of her. Plus, it's a really good book.
I'm glad you gave that piece of Maria advice. I've felt weird abandoning the nonfiction manuscript (momentarily or not) in pursuit of the novel, but I'm much more excited about the novel. And that's what matters. Everything I poured into that nonfiction puke is helping me now!

[K]

Read enough of your thesis to know it's not puke, but I know what you mean about how writing fiction is more exciting somehow.

[kate]

Of course the book's pov is "a third person perforated with other points of view." I had been calling it "omniscient." You're right as usual, man.

[K]

Amy tends to create the impression of omniscient narration by actually being close to omniscient.