A marriage intact A Contrary review by Cynthia Newberry Martin 
Stiltsville Susanna Daniel Harper 2010 Buy this book...> A stilt house off the shore of Miami is a wondrous and fragile thing, built against all odds of survival. As is a marriage. Although we know that nothing lasts forever, still we hope that some things will. Stiltsville, the debut novel by Susanna Daniel, is straightforward and unsurprising, and each day that I was reading it, I could not wait to return to it. There was nothing there but sea and sky, but then a few matchbox shapes formed on the hazy horizon. They grew larger and I saw that they were houses, propped above the water on pilings. We know, just a few pages into the story, that Frances and Dennis will be together. But the novel has an undertow—Frances knows the end of the story—and this fact pulls at the reader. I don’t think Dennis meant to kiss me…We kept our eyes open. We could feel even then that we were at the beginning of something, I think—something that might go on and on before it ended. We attend the wedding of Dennis’ sister because it is full of dramatics. Of Frances and Dennis’ wedding, we are merely told, “We married in Atlanta, in the Baptist church I’d attended as a child.” On the bottom of the same page, “We had a little girl and named her Margo…” Three pages later, 1970, the section, concludes with these words: Perhaps what is still most surprising to me about Miami is that in spite of its lurid excesses and unreal beauty and unreal ugliness, it was possible for me, a girl from Georgia, to create a life there. Overall, an excellent life. A life I knew even as I was living it, I would miss when it came to an end. Daniel saves the reader, and herself, a little work by dividing the novel into sections labeled by year—leaping over huge amounts of time. But then life often feels that way: We are going to college, and the next thing we know, our children are. Although some of the most interesting points in the novel go unexplored—the sadness felt by the young Frances, the different versions of Frances over the years, her fear of “What if everything was not as it seemed,” and the question of the lives we were “meant to live”—a novel that attempts to cover the life of a marriage must choose its battles, leaving these issues, perhaps, for another book. In these electronic days, the book is, more than ever before, an object, and Stiltsville is a beautiful one. Its cover, designed by Christine Van Bree, is stunning in its starkness. Jason Fulford’s photograph shows a green ocean and white sky across which the title floats in lower case green letters. A green stilt house with orange shutters and pylons floats in the right corner below. Never mind that the stilt house we pull up to on page two is a “red-painted house with white shutters.” Stiltsville is about how a place comes to mean something to two people who mean something to each other. We fear for the safety of the stilt house just as we do the safety of Dennis and Frances. Early in the novel, Frances wonders, “How much weather could the house withstand? This was a question that would go unanswered for many years.” Yet it implies that the question will be answered. Also early in the novel, anticipating the destruction of the stilt house by a hurricane, Frances thinks, We would feel loss and lost, and I would realize once again: This is what it means to be part of a family. There are no maps and the territory is continually changing. We are explorers, traveling in groups. The feat Daniel accomplishes in Stiltsville is to capture the life of two people over a span of twenty-three years and to present it to us as if it were a photograph we could look at whole before us in the way Frances remembers the stilt house—intact. Cynthia Newberry Martin is a writer who lives in Columbus, Georgia. Visit her blog, Catching Days. Index of Reviews...>http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/0061963070http://catchingdays.cynthianewberrymartin.com/http://catchingdays.cynthianewberrymartin.com/Reviews.htmlhttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/0061963070shapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1shapeimage_1_link_2shapeimage_1_link_3

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