The Ocean House: Stories

by Mary-Beth Hughes

Overview

A stunning story cycle from bestselling New York Times Notable author, Mary-Beth Hughes, The Ocean House explores the fractured lives of families from a beach town on the Jersey Shore as the consequences of loss pass through generations.

Faith, a mother of two young children, Cece and Connor, is in need of summer childcare. As a member of a staid old beach club in her town and a self-made business consultant, she is appalled when her brother-in-law sends her an unruly, ill-mannered teenager named Lee-Ann who appears more like a wayward child than competent help. What begins as a promising start to a redemptive relationship between the two ends in a tragedy that lands Faith in a treatment facility, leveled by trauma.

Years later, Faith and her mother, Irene, visit Cece in college. A fresh-faced student with a shaved head and new boyfriend, Cece has become a force of her own. Meanwhile, her grandmother, Irene, is in the early stages of dementia. She slips in and out of clarity, telling lucid tales of her own troubled youth. Faith dismisses her mother’s stories as bids for attention. The three generations of women hover between wishful innocence and a more knowing resilience against the cruelty that hidden secrets of the past propel into the present.

Including stories from an array of characters orbiting Faith’s family, The Ocean House weaves an exquisite world of complicated family tales on the Jersey Shore. In ever-tender and elegant prose, Mary-Beth Hughes masterfully explores the emotional consequences of loss and the saving graces of love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802157539
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	1,060,474
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Mary-Beth Hughes is the author of the bestselling novel Wavemaker II, a New York Times Notable Book, and the acclaimed collection Double Happiness, which earned a Pushcart Prize. Her latest book, The Loved Ones, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Georgia Review, and A Public Space. She lives in Brooklyn and Rhinebeck, New York.

Table of Contents

The Ocean House 1

Outcast 39

The Healing Zone 67

Here You Are 91

The Elixir 107

Dove 125

The Pitch 151

Summerspace 159

Fragile X 185

How the Poets Learned to Love Her 205

California 219

Acknowledgments 243

Editorial Reviews

10/19/2020

Set in and around the Jersey shore, Hughes’s arresting new collection (after her novel The Loved Ones) orbits multiple generations of families connected by love, grief, and estrangement. With an enviable ear for dialogue and high command of prose, Hughes finds in these overlapping stories a stark beauty amid scenes of suffering and death. In “Dove,” a standout, a young man returns to his dying mother’s house, sharing his vigil uncomfortably with his stepfather and a nurse who smells as though “she wore a sprig of herbs beneath her smock.” In the title story, set in 1962, two sisters living in one of the “last of the great oceanfront houses left in Long Branch” yearn to connect with their lovely and unknowable mother, whose own mother was killed in the London Blitz. In “California,” a young girl and her father navigate life in the wake of the mother’s departure to a series of rehab facilities for substance abuse. There are many telling moments—a woman smiles at a young man because “that’s what any decent person does, they say hello to goodness, no matter how small, how tangled.” Hughes is a careful reader of her characters, and she captures their small, easy-to-miss moments of humanity through life’s vicissitudes. These stories pack a punch. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Advance Praise for The Ocean House

"[The Ocean House] accrues a rich, novelistic sweep and leaves readers with a vertiginous sense of contingency." —New York Times

“Hughes’s deep dive into its characters is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s close study of her Bloomsbury denizens, or J.D. Salinger’s psychological probings of the Glass family. Regarding her resources of art and craft, Hughes is just as masterful. … Hughes doles out details deftly; nothing is incidental. … The Ocean House is a collection so varied in its telling, rich in its details and character-divining that it demands to be re-read…Her penetrating glimpses into the depths of these lives make us more deeply aware of our own.”—Arts Fuse

"Arresting... With an enviable ear for dialogue and high command of prose, Hughes finds in these overlapping stories a stark beauty amid scenes of suffering and death.[She] is a careful reader of her characters, and captures their small, easy-to-miss moments of humanity through life’s vicissitudes. These stories pack a punch." —Publisher's Weekly

“A Rube Goldberg–like collection of stories in which a single character from one tale trips a connection to another… A fascinating puzzle…Rich with detail and unexpected phrasing, Hughes’ prose illuminates her dark emotional terrain. Grief-stricken yet beautiful portraits of fractured lives." —Kirkus (starred review)

From the Publisher

★ 2020-10-14
From a New Jersey beach house, two little girls watch their mother silhouetted against the ocean. Suspended in time, this opening moment records their happiness, which will shatter.

Although their beautiful ocean house boasts a tower room (it’s even haunted) and delicate stained glass windows, it can’t protect the girls from the fracturing of their family or the loss of their own innocence. With this opening, Hughes deftly sets in motion a Rube Goldberg–like collection of stories in which a single character from one tale trips a connection to another. The links are often obscure, as with a wayward husband’s mysterious brother or the lingering echo of a woman’s name across another woman’s memory. Figuring out the links makes the whole book feel like a fascinating puzzle. In one story, a young woman arrives seemingly out of the narrative ether to serve as a nanny for Faith, a young mother. Her peculiar behavior amuses Faith until a bizarre tragedy strikes. Subsequent stories pick up the tale later, with Faith’s psychiatric hospitalization, her husband’s absconding to parts unknown, and her daughter Cece’s sessions with a therapist-in-training whose blunt methods threaten to retraumatize her. In one of the most troubling stories, a team of men try to convince a young woman (presumably Cece) to let them turn her experience of sexual assault into a violent cartoon, gradually transforming it into an unrecognizable male fantasy of domination. In another, Cece’s beloved best friend, Sebastian, returns home for his own mother’s death, negotiating his stepfather’s desire to erase him from the house and his sister’s inability to be present. Rich with detail and unexpected phrasing, Hughes’ prose illuminates her dark emotional terrain.

Grief-stricken yet beautiful portraits of fractured lives.

Kirkus Reviews