Sea of Hooks

by Lindsay Hill

Overview

A boy grew up beside a sea of hooks and he learned to swim in that sea and to notice the hooks as they rose and fell and twisted in the tides…

What if you saw the world—with all its signs and signals, its schedules and habits and goals, the matrix of friends, the unspoken codes of conduct—emptied of ordinary meaning?

Imagine that the debris collected from the streets of your childhood spoke more urgently to you, with messages and wonders that compelled you to enter another world, a world whose broken pieces converged at the junctures of vision and illusion, of life and death.

In this wise and beautiful novel, the reader follows Christopher Westall, an alarmingly imaginative young man, through repeated trauma and transformation, on a journey from San Francisco to Bhutan. His shattered life is woven from a thousand shards, hints, signs and tangled threads that are pursued and gathered toward its reassembly.

As memory, dream, fear and resilience exert their tidal pulls, Christopher's life tilts, collides, reverses, dissolves and reemerges, while risks and revelations glisten side-by-side in the depths of the Sea of Hooks.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620540060
Publisher:	McPherson & Company
Publication date:	11/28/2013
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Lindsay Hill was born in San Francisco and graduated from Bard College. Since 1974, he has published six books of poetry and his work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals. Sea of Hooks is his first novel, the product of nearly twenty years of work. His other writing and editorial projects include the production of a series of recordings of innovative writing under the Spoken Engine label, and the co-editing, with Paul Naylor, of the literary journal Facture. Since leaving a career in banking, he has worked in the nonprofit sector. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, the painter Nita Hill.

Editorial Reviews

This first novel by poet and one-time banker Hill is less a novel, in the traditional sense, than a spiritual biography. Christopher Westall, raised in San Francisco in the 1950s and heady ’60s, is the only child of an alcoholic and distant father and an eccentric, meddling mother. The boy is alarmingly fragile and sensitive, and possessed by a soaring imagination and a slew of fascinating theories about sound, ice, “knife people” under his bed, and, most significantly, a world from which “messengers” communicate with him via random detritus he picks up in the street—slips of paper, foil from cigarette packs, etc. These he orders into a fantasy world. Repeated sexual abuse by a tutor makes escapism even more urgent for the 12-year-old, as do subsequent tragedies: his mother’s suicide in his bed; his father’s career misfortunes and early death. Not until Christopher is befriended by an older man named Dr. Thorn does a kind of mentoring occur; indeed, Dr. Thorn’s counsel—and final messages—delivers Christopher to a form of peace, achieved through the practice of Buddhism and a pilgrimage to Bhutan when the latter is an adult. But it is Hill’s language that dominates this story, which is told in fractured bits, not unlike the messengers. Christopher’s mediations on death, memory, the relations of bones to the self, not to mention rain and snow and fog and the cosmos, are mystical, highly poetic and musically rendered—an almost impossibly sustained performance from beginning to end. Nearly every paragraph astonishes, every moment rich with magic and daring. Reminiscent of Robert Pirsig and Herman Hesse in its concern with authenticity, Sea of Hooks also has the unbearable anguish of Kafka’s diaries—making for an unforgettable trip. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2013-09-15
A remarkable and multifaceted novel--philosophical, poignant and puzzling. The central event of the narrative is Christopher Westall's discovery of the body of his mother, Evelyn, who died by suicide. Christopher was 22 when this happened, and the novel moves chronologically both backward and forward from this one event. Although a few weeks after his mother's death Christopher goes to Bhutan, most of the book is taken up by Christopher's life before his mother's suicide. We find a number of complexities in his character--for example, although he was a fairly mediocre student, he was a prodigy at bridge. At a young age, he'd gotten sexually involved with a Stanford graduate student, and later in his adolescence, he became intrigued with Dr. Thorn, whose philosophical mind appealed to the many questions Christopher was raising at the time. The central relationships of his life, however, remained those with his mother and, to a lesser extent, with his father, Westy, a gruff atheist with little emotional subtlety. In contrast, Evelyn was hypersensitive and always a tad strange. The form of the novel is fragmented and recursive, with chapters ranging from one sentence to several pages. While there's a linearity of sorts, Hill is far more interested in moving the narrative along through image patterns (fire, destiny, the "knife-people" lying flat and "sharpening themselves against each other") as well as through the preoccupations and questionings of Christopher's mind. A tour de force, but definitely not for every taste.

Kirkus Reviews