Desert Daze: Amy Shearn’s “How Far is the Ocean from Here”

By Jenny Shank, 8-18-08

How Far is the Ocean From Here
By Amy Shearn
Shaye Areheart Books, 307 pages, $23

Amy Shearn’s surefooted debut novel How Far is the Ocean From Here transports readers to the “godforsaken fleabag” Thunder Lodge motel in the middle of a stretch of desert “somewhere between West Texas and East New Mexico,” the last place you’d think the nine-month-pregnant protagonist, Susannah Prue, would want to be in high summer.  In the time-honored tradition followed by those who’ve made a hash of their lives, Susannah is fleeing west.  She is serving as the surrogate mother for a wealthy couple, and with the due date two weeks away, she impulsively drives out of Chicago and fetches up at the Thunder Lodge. 

Susannah is forced to settle in there after Marlon Garland, who owns the Lodge with his surly wife Char, pronounces the engine of her car dead.  While Susannah incubates the baby with no particular plan in mind, she comes to enjoy the company of Tim, the Garlands’ handsome, mentally disabled teenage son, and the only other two guests who check in during her stay: Frankie, a child of ambiguous gender raised against her will as a girl, and Frankie’s aunt Dicey, who is transporting her across country to live with her father.  Meanwhile, the sophisticated middle-aged power couple, Julian and Kit Forsythe, whose baby is in Susannah’s womb, set out in pursuit. 

From this array of characters, which at first seems as arbitrary as any random group of guests at a motel, Shearn sets in motion a gripping plot and creates a desert society that functions like many desert societies must, with people becoming involved in each other’s lives simply because there are so few people to go around.  Three characters who form a team by the end of the novel all have in common the threshold status of their lives—Susannah stuck somewhere between youth and almost-motherhood, Frankie between male and female, and Tim between child and man, all of them marooned in an especially barren stretch of desert that is “unvaried by cactus or tree, unstirred by lizard or coyote, undimpled by even a shadow.”

Shearn gradually reveals that Susannah became a surrogate because she was suffering from a mid-twenties angst, having failed to make much of her life yet.  Her longtime boyfriend recently broke up with her, leaving her to continue to work at a Chicago bookstore.  One day she had the idea to break herself out of her rut with a grand, decisive gesture, and answered an ad for a surrogate.  The mild angst of educated twenty-somethings can often make for a “so what?” read, but Shearn avoids this trap by forcing Susannah to encounter people whose problems are thornier than her own.  But Shearn especially evades tedium through the humor, liveliness, and inventiveness of her language.  Although for many parts of the novel, Susannah and the other characters do little but lounge around the pool or rest in their air-conditioned rooms, How Far is the Ocean From Here is never dull because of Shearn’s winning language.

Shearn’s descriptions of what it feels like to be pregnant are funny and accurate: “The baby was restless.  He was a contrary one, you could tell, and as soon as she wanted to rest, he started practicing his moves—it was like he was training for some sort of dance off in there, some sort of cross-country-runningish thing—and as soon as she was awake, he was as still as the dead.” When Susannah faints at one point, she rebukes herself, “She’d never fainted in her life.  God!  The whole thing had been so pregnant of her.”

Shearn’s descriptions of the desert—of what people expect the desert to be and what the desert actually is—are also insightful: “To the amateur, like Susannah, a desert is an abstraction, a metaphor, a Hollywood soundstage for hatchet-faced cowpokes and horses in symbolic colors, a cartoon involving a parched rider on a knobby-kneed horse and palm-treed mirages that rise shimmering from the sand.  But here at the Thunder Lodge, there was a different kind of desperateness.  The earth wore a colorless skin of dust, rashy with outcroppings of low-lying, dead-looking shrubs.”

Amy Shearn’s How Far is the Ocean From Here is an appealing novel, showcasing a new talent whose wit will make readers happy to follow her anywhere, even to a “godforsaken fleabag” motel in the middle of the desert.