Sarah Stone’s Marriage to the Sea opens with a short, dreamlike sequence about a man lost at sea. His identity and significance don’t become clear until later. This early disorientation sets the tone for the rest of the book, as various characters find themselves at crossroads, in altered states of consciousness, and plagued by strange dreams or ghostly visitations.
In the first section, twenty-something Jewish sisters Katya and Arielle are frustrated in their careers and reeling after their father’s sudden death. It is 2011 and Occupy protests take center stage around the world; despite being in debt, the sisters impulsively leave their home in Santa Cruz for Paris, where environmental activist Katya has signed up to attend a weeklong conference led by one of her heroes. Arielle, an out-of-work Shakespearian actress, decides to tag along for the adventure.
Katya is prickly and uncompromising, and her outspokenness has cost her a series of jobs at environmental nonprofits, where she feels that complacency and bureaucracy have taken the place of direct action. She can’t understand how to be happy in a world in imminent peril, with rising sea levels, climate calamities, and increasing hunger and inequality. While desperate to be useful among the highly intellectual scholarly types attending the conference, she falls into volunteering in the kitchen, where she finds herself romantically drawn to the practical daughter of her activist hero.
Meanwhile, Arielle gradually retreats into a sort of Shakespearean fever dream, which results in excessive sleepiness. But Katya fears this is caused by a relapse of her sister’s drug addiction. When summoned, in a panic by Katya, the girls’ aunt Julia, an experimental actress who has given up a successful Hollywood career, comes to Paris from her home in Venice to assist her nieces, where she too is drawn into an intense and sudden love affair.
Though it functions as a unified whole, the book is described as linked novellas, as the two main parts tell the story from the perspectives of different characters. While the first section focuses on Arielle and Katya, the second follows their aunt Julia back to Venice with her new companion as she prepares for her role with a world-renowned experimental theater troupe in the upcoming Venice Biennale Festival.
Marriage to the Sea is a follow-up to Stone’s earlier novel, Hungry Ghost Theater, which featured many of the same characters. This thought-provoking, lyrical work delves deeply into the worlds of climate activism and experimental theater, featuring heady discussions and explorations into the nature of consciousness, mental illness, Jewish observance, and the afterlife, with strong influences from Shakespeare, Dante, and Greek mythology throughout.
Lauren Gilbert is the Director of the Municipal Library of New York City. She was formerly the Director of Public Services at the Center for Jewish History.
