Introduction

In the summer of 1969, twelve-year-old Seth lives with his unstable mother, Ruth, and his brother and sister in a two-bedroom apartment in New Jersey. His father lives with his new wife in a ten-room house and has no interest in Seth and his siblings. Seth is dying to escape from his mother's craziness and suffocating love, her marriage to a man she's known for two weeks, and his father's cold disregard.
 
Over the next four decades, Seth becomes the keeper of his family's memories and secrets. At the same time, he emotionally isolates himself from all those who love him, especially his mother. But Ruth is also Seth's muse, and this enables him to ultimately find redemption, for both himself and his family.

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Excerpt

Sea of Tranquility

• J u l y 1 9 6 9 •

My mother met Eddie Lipper in the Catskills on July 4, 1969, and married him in Las Vegas sixteen days later. She claimed they were pronounced man and wife at the exact moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I didn’t believe her, but I was twelve years old that summer and would have welcomed just about any man into our lives. My mother was thirty-five, and I know the same was true for her.

We were a family of four: me; my mother, Ruth; my twin sister, Sarah; and our younger brother, Seamus—a name recommended to my mother by our neighbor Mary Murphy from County Cork. My name is Seth. Seth Shapiro. Ruth said she selected all of our names because she wanted our initials to represent how strongly we were connected: SSSSSS. She called us her chain of love. She was right, of course—the four of us were deeply and painfully bound together—but over time I have come to see these letters as an ideogram for silence.

My parents met at NYU. My mother was an undergraduate there, and my father was in the medical school. Throughout her teenaged years Ruth had been overweight and mentally unstable. At sixteen she was hospitalized after an especially bad psychotic episode. She regressed into an infantile state, blathering in baby babble and covering herself in her own feces. Four years later, she had lost fifty pounds and learned to keep herself calm with cigarettes and tranquilizers. For her second date with my father, she brought him home to Long Island for a Sabbath dinner. He proposed one month later. By the fifth year of their marriage, my mother had given birth to three children. In the seventh year of their marriage, my father made an important medical discovery that gilded his career. His photograph appeared in Life magazine in a story about one hundred outstanding young Americans. He was an overnight star and left my mother for a young woman from France who had come to Boston to spend a year as a postdoc in his lab. My mother was twenty-nine.

At that time we were living in a small house in a Boston suburb. After the divorce, my mother moved us to a four room apartment in New Jersey in order to be closer to her family. She began dating not long after we moved. I’m sure she was in no condition to look for another husband, but her sister and father viewed my mother’s divorce as a shame, an embarrassment. I felt exactly the same. Not having a father around, I was as self-conscious as someone with two noses. My mother was usually fixed up with men by her older sister, Rhoda—a depressing assortment of widowers or odd, bland, thoroughly second-rate men. Still, I viewed every man she went out with as a potential father, and I watched her get ready for her dates with hope and amazement. She always enlisted my help in fastening her girdle-and-brassiere contraption. I didn’t like this job, but I was the only one with the strength to do it. I didn’t like how the thing felt so stiff and heavy with metal components. I didn’t like the columns of flesh that formed down the length of my mother’s back as I placed each clasp in its eyelet. I needed all my strength for the last couple of clasps, by which point her back would look like a Torah scroll. Sometimes when she called for my help I would catch my mother admiring her breasts in the mirror. They were pendant shaped and enormous, mapped with bluish veins beneath skin so pink and shiny that it appeared translucent. She would cup them, lift them, lower them, then say with a sigh, “Jesus, I have great breasts.”

The next morning I would pump her for news about her date, but she was always indifferent. One man might have been too old, another not well educated enough for her. She would give me these reports as she studied a crossword puzzle through a haze of cigarette smoke. The real problem, we both knew, was that any man was too far a step down from my father—a handsome, vital, successful doctor. One weekend, Rhoda and her husband went to a Catskills resort. Eddie was the recreation director, and Rhoda handed him Ruth’s phone number. Two weeks later, my mother drove up to the Catskills on a Friday night to meet him. My brother, sister, and I stayed with Rhoda and her family. I loved Rhoda’s ranch house. When I opened her refrigerator, I was dazzled by the bounty of bright fruit—cherries, grapes, peaches, oranges, and bowls of melon balls. The pantry was neatly lined with enough food to last for five years. They had owned a color television since 1965, built right into the brick wall of their family room. Their finished basement was furnished with ping-pong and billiard tables, and the closets were brimming with toys. Someday, I vowed, I would live this way.

When my mother returned on Sunday night, she was in an exuberant mood. She and Rhoda were sitting at the kitchen table; I was two steps below them, in the family room, sitting on the shag carpet with my siblings and cousins, watching The Wonderful World of Disney, but I tuned in to what my mother was saying.

“Oh, Rhoda, let me tell you, he’s the right man. I know it! He told me he’s always wanted boys to raise.” I knew how much my mother wanted her older sister’s approval, and I felt a little bad for her when Rhoda said in a cautious sounding voice, “Well, that’s nice for you, Ruth. That’s nice.” But I understood Rhoda’s wariness— my mother’s enthusiasm was completely unmodulated, like the voice of a person who’s hard of hearing. Barry, Rhoda’s husband, studied my mother over the top of his Ben Franklin glasses.

“Just be careful, young lady, ” Barry said.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” my mother said. “I can handle myself just fine.”

“We know,” Barry said. “You’re a good girl, Ruth.” My mother downed her iced tea in one long gulp, like a shot of some bracing moral tonic. “Of course I am,” she declared. “I’ve always been a good girl.”

On the way home my mother told us that Eddie had asked her to marry him.

“After one weekend?” Sarah exclaimed.

“I think he’d be a good father.”

“How do you know?” she said.

“Because he told me he always wanted boys to raise.”

“You’re both out of your minds,” Sarah declared.

My mother and I exchanged looks in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were apprehensive; we both understood that there was very little connection between our words and our true feelings. In two days my brother, sister, and I were going to spend two weeks with my father and his family at a summerhouse he had recently bought on Cape Cod. My mother had been deeply unsettled by my father’s invitation, and I sensed her high excitement about Eddie was a reaction to our upcoming visit with my father. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the Publisher:

1. “Do you know what your problem is?” Seth’s father says to him. “You remember
everything that’s not important.” What role does Seth’s memory play in the
novel? Despite his father’s comments, why is Seth’s capacity for remembering
“everything that’s unimportant” one of his most valuable and endearing qualities?
Near the end of the book, Seth comments, “We’d be the happiest family in the
world if no one remembered anything.” But how do the stories and memories of
any family define and enrich their lives? What is the role of memory and
storytelling in any family’s understanding of itself?
2. Seth’s brother, Seamus, accuses Seth of acting funny when he’s really sad. What
is the role of humor in a novel with so much sadness?
3. Seth is deeply in love with his wife, Molly, but confesses to his sister that he
didn’t love her well enough. Why doesn’t Seth do a better job of loving Molly?
4. On her deathbed, Ruth says to Seth, “I hope I was a good mother,” and Seth
replies, “Yes, of course you were.” Does Seth believe his own words? Is Ruth a
good mother? Is Seth a good son?
5. Like many children of difficult parents, Seth and Sarah are afraid of becoming
like their mother. But how are both Seth and Ruth “Strangers on the Planet”?
6. The one male character Seth forms a close relationship with is Raymond, who is
blind and gay. Why does Seth befriend Raymond, and why does he react so badly
when he realizes that Raymond is gay?
7. One of the turning points in the novel is when Seth decides to keep his story from
being published. Ten years later, he rereads the story and realizes that it was the
most meaningful thing he had accomplished in his life. Why does Seth feel this
way? What has he forfeited by abandoning his promise as a writer? What other
opportunities has Seth undermined in his life? Why does he act against his own
self-interest on so many occasions? Later on in the same chapter, Seth says, “I had
always been too cautious to embrace what I wanted; I had always played the odds
in life.” How does this quote help explain why Seth never writes another story
after “A Stranger on the Planet”?
8. In the chapter “Virgins,” Rachel looses her virginity to Seth, but how does Seth
loose his “virginity” as a writer? How does this experience change his life?
9. What is the relationship between the short story “A Stranger on the Planet” and
the novel itself? Early in the novel, Seth says, “Nothing seemed real to me except
the novels I read.” Why is literature such an important medium of self-knowledge
for Seth?
10. After Seth and Raymond see the movie The Searchers, Raymond comments:
“John Wayne isolates himself from love and caring. But when he discovers
Natalie Wood, he realizes his capacity for nurturing and love. She’s his best half
and he finally becomes a whole person.” How do Raymond’s words also
characterize Seth? Does Seth ever become a whole person? Does he ever find his
best half?

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