Book review: ‘Sea Change'

To Guy, the pages of the diary have become “more real, at times, than the life they all had when they were together.” In it, he has brought his family -- Freya is now 10 -- to the Southern United States for a tour that will take them from Miami to Nashville. Details of their sightseeing, hotels and even the daily temperatures come from the “street plans ... maps and city guides of America” covering the desk in the cabin of Guy’s 90-foot boat.

During the day, despite warnings from a friendly fisherman that the North Sea “ain't no playground,” Guy puts more and more distance between himself and land, seemingly eager for the moment when the inevitable storm strikes -- the same kind he wasn’t prepared for when his child met up with the “indifferent, murderous” force of nature.

A chance meeting with a mother and her 20-something daughter on a neighboring boat draws Guy into a temporary relationship that hints at the future he could have: The two women are both alluring and disturbing in the way they mirror his missing pieces. Yet he’s not ready to abandon the life of his diary, the nightly tale that keeps reality at bay.

It’s all the more puzzling that the farther Guy sails out into an increasingly unpredictable ocean each day, the more he shrinks from nature in his fictional travels.

In his imaginary North Georgia mountains, where the air is “full of the scent of pin oak and hickory,” he observes that “they make air fresheners of this kind of thing.” At Amicalola State Park, he pictures black bears with “fur as wet as carwash rollers” that never appear, while his wife and daughter stay at the lodge, refusing to take the trail to the falls. When he catches sight of alligators in the Everglades, it’s a pile of their feet, “dried, polished and heavily scaled, with twisting claws like the hands of an Egyptian mummy.”

Unlike the traditional family tragedy novel (think Jodi Picoult), the efforts Guy makes in “Sea Change” to cope with his devastating losses occur largely in his head. Page, whose extraordinary debut novel, “Salt” (2007), won high praise for its minutely observed history of an eccentric family in East Anglia, is perfectly suited to render Guy’s dreamy, interior monologues, where past, present and invented future intermingle, overlap and sometimes become indistinguishable from one another.

But the close, precise observations that worked to his advantage in “Salt” often fall out of sync with the subject matter here, as if Page didn’t trust them to make his points. At times, too much microscopic detail lands in the wrong place, distracting from what little action there is and slowing it down to a crawl.

The foreshadowing is stage-whispery, and meaningful experiences too often end in trite summary. Take this description of Guy’s thoughts after a remarkable, harrowing encounter with two wild dogs: “The greater the force of the assault, the greater the defense. Life has that pattern now, a perfect equation: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

The real strength of the book lies in the moments when Page takes his foot off the sustain pedal: Solitary mornings when Guy makes pancakes soaked in butter and syrup. Memories of childhood and an unapproachable father that shed light on the way he’s always “felt on the edges of other people’s lives.”

And then there's this passage where he awkwardly explains his status when asked if he has any children: “How can he possibly answer this? Being a father is complicated, it can’t be so easily undone. There’s a reason there’s no word for when you are a father no more.”

As a tour of the South, “Sea Change” offers little more than Guy’s unfolding fictional drama set in a handful of stubbornly unscenic areas: a souvenir shop in the Everglades, the steel and glass lodge at Amicalola Falls, a Nashville recording studio.

In the journey Guy makes to recover the pieces of a lost life, it offers much more: a moving portrait of a father who, unable to save what he most loved, tried to save what could have been.