One of the best things about book series is getting to know their characters over time. Most often, in my experience, these kinds of series appear in genres—fantasy, sci-fi, detective, young adult, etc.—that are extremely popular with readers and historically sneered at by a certain literary elite. I’d wager, though, that even those who only read so-called literary fiction (a difficult genre to define) enjoy returning to characters they already know, as evidenced by the success of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, for instance, or Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again.
While I’m a promiscuous, genre-hopping reader, I mostly write about literary fiction, and it was a joy to spend the past couple of months with the Zamarin family, protagonists of Bay Area author Sarah Stone’s 2018 Hungry Ghost Theater and her new book, Marriage to the Sea, which contains two linked novellas.
In Hungry Ghost Theater, we’re introduced to the Zamarins in 1993 via their most dramatic members: siblings Julia and Robert, who perform with their experimental theater company, and their eight-year-old niece, Arielle, who is enraptured by what she sees onstage. The event is Robert and Julia’s production of a devised play about the Mesopotamian goddesses Inanna and Ereshkigal—it is also about the Gulf War, because experimental political theater can be like that.
The rest of the book mostly takes place in 2004 and 2005, with occasional flashbacks, and includes some dreamlike chapters formatted as plays. Hungry Ghost Theater follows the adult Arielle’s slow and uncertain recovery from addiction with the support of her parents, Eva and Ray, and her sisters, Katya and Jenny; Julia and Robert’s conflicts within their theater company, News of the World; their (and Eva’s) aging parents; and their mother’s history of mental illness. In the novel’s last third, a tragic and random act of violence changes the family’s dynamics forever.
Marriage to the Sea starts in April 2011, six years after that cataclysmic event. While it’s not strictly necessary to read Hungry first, I’d recommend it for the delicious familiarity of coming into Stone’s latest with an understanding of what the Zamarins have been through.
The first novella, Shadow Island, focuses on Katya and Arielle, whose father, Ray, has recently and very suddenly died, leaving them reeling. Katya, a recovering alcoholic and the most like Ray in her obsession with the sorry state of the planet and its people—hunger, displacement, war, climate change—sees a ghostly vision of him in her living room, which sets her off on a quest of sorts, to become the kind of person who can change, or maybe even save, the world. She does this, ridiculously and with some measure of self-awareness, by going to Paris, to attend the Reimagining Food Justice 2011 conference at an institute run by one of Ray’s activist heroes, Raine Mangot.
Arielle insists on coming along, and she and Katya arrive in Paris deep in credit card debt but excited: Arielle to explore the city, maybe to even find some work as an actor after some disappointing auditions stateside, and Katya to become indispensable to Raine somehow, to prove that she is capable of doing real good in the world, even if that’s by facilitating other activists’ actions. Instead, however, the sisters end up on unexpected journeys.
Arielle becomes slowly immersed in a dream world—or is it reality, and this one is the dream?—in which she appears to be getting closer and closer to her deceased father. Katya, meanwhile, is worried about Arielle’s increasing sleepiness and the possibility that her sister is using again, and it doesn’t help matters that she’s woefully out of her depth at the conference. She wants so badly to be fully immersed, to understand the dull statistics and proposals for policy changes and pilot programs, but Katya, unlike her actor relatives, can be nothing but herself, and the truth is, she’s bored. Instead of finding transformation at the conference itself, she experiences something wholly unexpected: She falls in love with a person performing the exact indispensable role Katya was hoping to fill for Raine. Along the way, Katya also comes to terms with the painful reality of being a person who cares immensely about injustice: “About happiness, see, I’ve noticed something totally obvious, but…you have to give up your preconditions,” she tells her new love. “Mine have always included no more torture, no more war, and no humans or other animals suffering.… It didn’t feel like my happiness could be justified. But my unhappiness gives nothing at all to the world. I don’t think I’ll be any more or less effective if I let myself be as happy as my particular temperament allows.”
The second (and title) novella picks up shortly after the first ends but focuses on Katya and Arielle’s aunt, Julia, and her new photographer husband as the two move in together in Venice, Italy, where Julia’s been living since fleeing a brief bout of Hollywood success. Disabled following the aforementioned tragedy in Hungry Ghost Theater, Julia uses canes and is always aware of pain coursing through her in varying degrees of severity. Readers with chronic pain will find that Stone has written about the experience with a degree of matter-of-fact accuracy rarely encountered in fiction: “Still, pain came and went. You had to not panic during the bad times. And also had to avoid believing, during those rare moments when it had subsided, that you’d mastered it forever.”
Julia is a treat to read about, aware of her own performativity in a way that is both help and hindrance. During a bout of heartbreak, for instance, “she was being ludicrously histrionic in a moment of worldwide historical importance. Even alone in a room, she could not stop performing for an imaginary audience (who felt, at this moment, that she was overplaying the material).” She’s considered a remarkable actor by those she works with but also can’t help critiquing her own actions as performances because she believes that she has no actual self to return and retreat to. But what is the self if not how it’s acted out in the world?
Performativity may be a concept that’s recently and unfairly been derided on the internet, but in both novellas in Marriage to the Sea, Stone seems acutely aware of its usefulness and inevitability. We’re always performing for one another, for ourselves, and it’s not easy to distinguish performance from authenticity (even more so now, when the latter has become its own brand of performance). Stone’s profoundly human, realistic characters—full of idiosyncrasies, making questionable choices—are always wrestling with this complexity, and it’s a pleasure to behold. •
Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. Masad is the author of the novels Beings and All My Mother’s Lovers and is coediting a forthcoming anthology about the Bachelor franchise.
