There is a difference between the word “house” and the word “home”. A house is a shelter made of bricks. It can crumble, burn, be destroyed, and we can build a new one. A home is an idea. Few people know how to build a house, but anyone can build a home. It’s Christmas and birthdays, and that huge fight you had with your mom when you wanted to paint your room. It can be a house, an apartment, another person. When you’re tired and beat at the end of the day, when everything has gone wrong, and you want to go home, you don’t want to go to the house. You want that space you have created that’s yours; you want your people, your pets, or just to be alone in that place you call home.
Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (305 pages, $27.58) is about a sleepy New England coastal town that becomes home for two summer visitors. Kate Lancaster invites her good friend Helen Denis to spend a few months at her late aunt’s house, and the two quickly become integrated in the community. It is a community of fishermen and housewives, each with their own story to tell. It is a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s history. The fashions are from another generation, and there is little in the way of excitement, yet these two young women are never bored with the inhabitants of Deephaven.
The girls befriend the fishermen of the village, stopping to watch them work and listen to their stories of being on the ocean. They visit their friends in the lighthouse, and go fishing for their dinner. They spy on the secretive old captains who sit sunning themselves on the wharf, hoping to catch the outrageous tales they tell each other.
My favorites are the stories Captain Sands tells Helen and Kate. He tells them about all of the times when his relatives and acquaintances have known when someone close to them is about to die. He believes that people are connected in a way that science cannot yet explain. We still hear such stories today. The mother that wakes up in the middle of the night knowing that her child is in danger, the twins that know when the other is upset no matter where they are, and the wife who knows when her husband is ill even if he is not there. A pessimist would say that it is blind luck, but maybe, just maybe, we are connected to the people we love. Either way, Ms. Jewett is building on her themes of home and community. In the novel, a community is not a collection of random people, but is a kind of extended family. The neighbors take care of each other with the same compassion they would a family member.
The girls become part of the community even though they are not permanent residents. Acceptance is instantaneous; there is no suspicion of outsiders. Deephaveners are warm and friendly, and the girls quickly become as caring and attentive to their neighbors as those that have lived in Deephaven for years. As someone who has very little knowledge of her neighbors, I found this openness fascinating. Suburbia allows its inhabitants to create their own little islands using privacy fences. Getting to know your neighbors is optional, but it is mandatory in Deephaven. Deephaveners are far from resentful of this fact, and see their way of life as the best. Larger cities like Boston are regarded as exotic, but hardly appealing. It seems that the other people of the village are what make Deephaven home. The familial ease between neighbors transfers to the girls. Their relationship eventually becomes the relationship that Deephavers have with each other. They are more like sisters when they leave than when they came, which made me wonder if community begets community. The girls spend months around people who treat them like family, and the two become closer to each other than ever. Does the mere presence of home and family cause others to create their own home and familial relationships?
Admittedly, Sarah Orne Jewett is not the author one should go to for excitement. Intrigue, mistaken identities, and love triangles are nowhere to be found in her stories. She is the author one reads to slow down and relax. Her tone is never hurried, and she addresses her reader as a friend. She lovingly moulds her characters through the stories they tell. Every inhabitant has a “pet story” they love to tell, and it says more about the teller than the people it involves. The book is lovely, but something you have to be in the mod for. In the age of Twitter and instant everything, there’s something to be said for taking your time.
Next week: The Highwayman by R.A. Salvatore
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