Book Review: Shelby Raebeck's 'East Hampton Blue'

“If life’s lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.” – Scott Turow

“East Hampton Blue,” a new novel by Shelby Raebeck is the story of Michael Dorian, a man defined by his relationships: husband, father, brother, friend. Michael is two months into sleeping apart from Genevieve. It is initially unclear if their marriage is failing and they are going to split, or if the union is merely ailing and they will figure out how to build back stronger. Michael seems to be hoping for the latter while Vivvy is apparently leaning the other way. Michael and Vivvy are parents to a daughter — Tommy, 15, sophomore in high school, strongly OCD and highly anxious.

Michael’s story is embedded in East Hampton and the swelling division between the been-heres and the come-heres. There is a powerful sense of place throughout the novel, which for those of us familiar with the East End, is a real pleasure. The beaches, the farms, the quiet winters versus the increasingly crowded summers:

“The summer people billowed into town, thickening each week, snarling the traffic in the village and along Montauk Highway all the way up to the Corchaug Reservation in Southampton.”

And:

“Michael and Willie [his brother] had grown up with the last thinned-out generation of fishermen and farmers, including Stuart Rayburn’s family, going to school in East Hampton with children of the last two families of haul-seiners, fishermen who had put their dories in straight off the ocean beaches, dropping their nets in a long arc and towing in the catch with winches affixed to pickup trucks. The tradesmen had hung on a while longer, but now the labor was being done either by immigrants or companies from up-island.”

Despite the late winter cold, early morning finds Michael surfing at Blue Beach. Surfing is one of several activities that repeat throughout the novel. For Michael, surfing is clearly a centering and grounding activity (oxymoron noted), and he often surfs with Stuart, an old school buddy, grabbing early mornings or free afternoons. After the invigorating surf session he comes home to get Tommy off to school:

“‘Time to get going,’ he said, sitting on Tommy’s bed and placing her covers over her, sending mixed messages, he knew. He held a hand on her shoulder, her face still blank with sleep. ‘Come on Tommy,’ he said, ‘let’s not be late.’

“Another habit Michael couldn’t abandon was speaking to Tommy in the first person plural. ‘We’re going to be late.’ ‘We need to take math more seriously.’ ‘We need to be sure your mother feels appreciated.’”

Michael and Willie are partners in Dorian Brothers Construction. They are building a 10,000 square foot home on Georgica Pond, and the architect for whom they are working wants them to take on another project for Jonathan Varniver, a wealthy New York City businessman builder. Michael is hesitant about taking on a second project, but that “‘Won’t be a problem,’ Willie said. ‘Landing the contracts is the key. Figuring it out’s the easy part.’”

Running through the novel is how building and development in East Hampton are spiraling out of control. Bigger and more palatial homes, more and more commercial development, bad for the ecology and bad for the aesthetics of East Hampton. Michael and Willie take on the second Georgica home, and eventually begin doing larger and larger commercial projects for the client, Varniver. They are finally making good money, but Michael is acutely torn about the scale of the work, the politics of using out-of-town labor, and at the behest of Varniver, cutting out the local subcontractors who are his friends and neighbors:

“This had always been the central wedge issue of East Hampton politics, whether to preserve the pool of local laborers or preserve the natural environment. The Democrats fought for the environment, up-zoning wherever possible and passing environmental impact legislation, which meant keeping the place exclusive, unaffordable for the working class people, while the Republicans defended the ever-shrinking pool of locals, down-zoning for low-income housing projects and commercial development, and creating a local Labor Alliance that was granted a seat each month at Town Council meetings.”

Vivvy starts dating a local realtor named Kyle, another old classmate of Michael’s. And eventually — telling him about it in a letter — she moves out and away to Riverhead. Michael wonders how she could leave her own child, yet in an odd way he doesn’t really feel deserted himself. “He stood still a moment, feeling frustrated, wanting to smash something. Then he felt forlorn, sad that it was always frustration he felt regarding Vivvy, all he’d felt for some time.”

She is a damaged person, an irresponsible parent, not showing up for Tommy when she promises, and not being sufficiently present in Tommy’s life. Michael realizes that he is unable to protect Tommy, “… at least not with the two parents she’d been dealt. Whatever phalanx he had imagined he and Vivvy providing had been punched through again and again, making it more sieve than shield.”

The novel takes place over the course of about three years, as Michael and Tommy get more accustomed to being the intact part of their family, and both of them become more accepting of Vivvy’s choice to move away. Michael is a caretaker. It is his love language. He takes excellent and protective care of Tommy, cooking her meals, teaching her to surf, helping her navigate her late teens, and helping her to better deal with her OCD issues. He also worries about and takes care of his brother Willie, who in the course of the novel is divorced and remarried and loses that wife as well. He continues to look out for Vivvy, trying to help her be a better parent to Tommy and even to be a better ex to him.

Raebeck writes with deftness, profound relational insight and great authority about many topics in “East Hampton Blue” — surfing, parenting, the construction business, failing marriages and sadness at life’s frequent injuries and injustices. The book is aptly titled, as the ‘blue’ refers to Michael’s favorite surfing beach, but also to a kind of gentle melancholy that he carries within. The writing is not flashy. Sentences are simple and mostly unadorned, lacking writerly tricks, but there is a quiet strength and a gentle but compelling style to the writing and the book as a whole.

There is a wonderful passage around the middle of the book:

“Reading the Greek tragedies in college, Michael had been struck by the idea of blindness, how not seeing, not knowing, could end up causing such destruction, such irreversible destruction, because with the Greeks there was no opportunity to repent — they erred, they suffered, and they were destroyed. It was only later in the Roman era, as Christianity took hold, that the idea of penitence arose — the recognition of one’s own personal failings and with it, the opportunity to make up for them. And so, rather than ending it all with an act of irreversible self-destruction — stabbing out your own eyes, murdering your children — you now had the option of puzzling through, feeling shitty about your mistakes, confessing your responsibility, and trying to make up for it somehow.”

For me, this was the crux of the novel. This is Michael puzzling through, taking responsibility, trying to fix what goes and has gone wrong, and trying hard to make things better for everyone. “East Hampton Blue” is a warm, lovely and thoughtful novel.

Author Shelby Raebeck will take part in a book signing and reading of “East Hampton Blue” on Saturday, May 4, at 3 p.m. at Amagansett Library, 215 Main Street, Amagansett. For information, visit amagansettlibrary.org.

Michael Z. Jody is a psychoanalyst and couples counselor who lives in East Hampton.