THE OCEAN HOUSE

From a New Jersey beach house, two little girls watch their mother silhouetted against the ocean. Suspended in time, this opening moment records their happiness, which will shatter.

Although their beautiful ocean house boasts a tower room (it’s even haunted) and delicate stained glass windows, it can’t protect the girls from the fracturing of their family or the loss of their own innocence. With this opening, Hughes deftly sets in motion a Rube Goldberg–like collection of stories in which a single character from one tale trips a connection to another. The links are often obscure, as with a wayward husband’s mysterious brother or the lingering echo of a woman’s name across another woman’s memory. Figuring out the links makes the whole book feel like a fascinating puzzle. In one story, a young woman arrives seemingly out of the narrative ether to serve as a nanny for Faith, a young mother. Her peculiar behavior amuses Faith until a bizarre tragedy strikes. Subsequent stories pick up the tale later, with Faith’s psychiatric hospitalization, her husband’s absconding to parts unknown, and her daughter Cece’s sessions with a therapist-in-training whose blunt methods threaten to retraumatize her. In one of the most troubling stories, a team of men try to convince a young woman (presumably Cece) to let them turn her experience of sexual assault into a violent cartoon, gradually transforming it into an unrecognizable male fantasy of domination. In another, Cece’s beloved best friend, Sebastian, returns home for his own mother’s death, negotiating his stepfather’s desire to erase him from the house and his sister’s inability to be present. Rich with detail and unexpected phrasing, Hughes’ prose illuminates her dark emotional terrain.

Grief-stricken yet beautiful portraits of fractured lives.