A Vast Expanse

At the end of The Tempest, Prospero drowns his books and buries his staff after orchestrating a storm to bring his enemies together on an island. He renounces his magic. Like Shakespeare’s metafictional farewell to the power of art, the final entry in Marie-Claire Blais’s Soifs cycle, the last book she completed before her death in 2021, confronts the anxieties of a writer at the end of a career.

Together by the Sea conjures a multitude of Blais’s previous characters for a gathering on an island somewhere between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico to celebrate the eighteenth birthday of Mai. Those unfamiliar with the series will find themselves just as disoriented as long-time readers: the story slips into the stream of consciousness of Mai’s father, Daniel, as he and his nonagenarian uncle, Isaac, stroll along the water, reflecting on the past and the celebration they have planned. Blais takes up the tradition of telling a family history through a patriarch, but she updates the trope with a range of disconnected relatives. With a wavelike force, the narrative moves through a cast of individuals as they go about their daily lives: a group of drag queens preparing for the opening of a club under the shadow of a threat; a young convict returning home; an activist fretting about the future of her children; an absent-minded poet mourning his wife, who died by assisted suicide. Those wary of experimental prose but willing to try will find in Blais’s long sentences and unconventional syntax more than mere effect. Amid the onrush of perspectives, a hidden coherence emerges, a coalescing experience of being alive that flows through the novel like a single animating breath.

Blais’s virtuosity lies in her ability to form a rich and textured harmony through disparate voices. Each narrator reflects on universal themes of love and loss. The choral effect belies Blais’s focus on the role of the writer during apocalyptic times. Artists — authors, painters, filmmakers, and architects — raise questions about the purpose of their work in society. In Adrien, a famous poet living out his last days in the tropics, Blais presents us with the detached and egotistical twentieth-century male writer. Elsewhere, Andrew, a formerly homeless musical prodigy developing an opera, and Samuel, a New Yorker choreographing a piece about pollution in China, are rendered as well-meaning but naive. Their work exists in a creative realm far removed from their lives and those who need them most.

The most provocative stand‑in for Blais is not the aging poet, nor is it Isaac, the wealthy architect and animal conservationist devoted to creating a utopia on his remote estate. Instead, it is Daniel, who lives in self-exile as he perpetually edits and rewrites his long, autobiographical novel, Strange Years.

Together by the Sea begins and ends with Daniel’s musings as he walks the shore, “lining up the facts, the past, in his mind” as he tries to “reconstruct each person’s existence” into yet another volume of his book. Adrift in his thoughts, he takes up the perspectives of various relatives — some of whom endured the Holocaust — and of a Nazi war criminal. Like his Biblical namesake, Daniel has a prescience that enables him to look at what lies beyond his reality, to commune with both strangers and the long-departed. Because of his clairvoyance, it’s possible to read the entire story — which is one, unbroken paragraph — as unfurling in the depths of Daniel’s mind.

As the day progresses, Isaac keeps thinking up “new architectural universes” and projects to bring about a just world. Daniel remains pessimistic about the future and what it would take to enact social change. Toward the end of Mai’s party, as the sun begins to set, Daniel is gripped by a vision of a great fire, though nobody around him seems to be worried. While hallucinating, he realizes that he is glad to have both nightmares and “crystal-clear dreams.” In the final pages, when Daniel receives a message from an old friend inviting him to the “twenty-first international festival of writers for peace” atop a Scottish mountain, we are forced to consider if this lofty gathering is anything more than a “soothing” idea, another one of Daniel’s “crystalline dreams among so many, another one of his limpid hopes.”

Unmoored from a centralized narrator, the novel allows for an ironic reading of the sincerity of its characters, such as Mélanie, who places her hopes for the future in the election of the first Black woman president, Donna Africa. Resisting the oversimplifications of utopia and dystopia alike, the writerly imagination emerges instead as a kind of natural force, a means of communing with a wholeness that lies beyond the illusions and constructs of humanity and of thinking beyond the confines of individuality. Blais’s questions about the value of an artist are answered in the autonomy of art itself. People will always find abundant meaning in literature and art, despite the meagre state of the world.

If the vastness of Blais’s project risks representing her characters as mere allegory, it’s only to make a claim for the greater vantage point that her experimentation provides. More than anything, Together by the Sea asks readers to marvel at the force of her prose, coming on clause after clause, and her ability to sing — in the words of another Florida habitué, Wallace Stevens —“beyond the genius of the sea.”