MOON TIDE

Lyrical first novel, enraptured by nature and language, traces the fortunes of three unusual women and the men who love them from the summer of 1913 to the hurricane of 1938.

Elizabeth Gonne Low, 65 when the story begins, is a wealthy outsider in the coastal town of Westport, Massachusetts, though she lives there year-round. So does Maggie, a 16-year-old immigrant from Latin America who tends to Elizabeth, beds down with a local merchant, and seems to know everything about animals and plants. Elizabeth’s granddaughter Eve comes for the summers, beginning in 1917 when the seven-year-old arrives with her father, grief-stricken after his wife’s mysterious death. Eve found her mother’s body, and she’s retreated into a hazy disconnect that entices Jake Wilkes, a local boy who “grows displaced from his own life” through reading the books in Elizabeth’s library. Jake’s older brother, Wes, solidly rooted in the town’s old ways, becomes a rum-runner and engages in a fierce, disastrous affair with Maggie. Eve feels Jake’s attraction (“somehow he had unwrapped her, and now she could not find her way back to being closed”), but she settles for Patrick Gerow, an architect designing fancy new houses for the summer people. Elizabeth’s thoughts turn increasingly toward death, Maggie nurses the shattered Wes, and Eve yearns for Jake as the narrative meanders toward the famous hurricane that devastated New England on September 21, 1938. The storm blows some energy into Tripp’s languid narrative, though even in this apocalyptic climax the prose tends to be overwrought, as are the plot developments. Tripp writes lovely sentences, but she’s so enamored by the sound of her authorial voice that the characters remain artful constructs without convincing lives of their own.

Lots of nicely rendered, physically specific details about farming, fishing, and hunting in the first third of the 20th century, but too many of the central insights are as solemn and obvious as the moon imagery that gives the book its title.