MOON TIDE

The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 looms over this ponderous, overwritten debut novel, set in Westport Point, a small fishing town and summer resort on the Massachusetts coast. Tracing the lives of three women over a period of 30 years, Tripp sets their stories in a tangle of reverie and natural lore. Elizabeth Lowe, eccentric widow of a Harvard zoologist, has lived in the town for decades. Elderly now, she spends her time compiling lists of the village dead, reading from her large library and dreaming of the past. Her granddaughter Eve, introverted and reclusive since finding her mother's body after she committed suicide, visits the town in the summers, gravitating toward Jake, a local boy and laborer, from the time she is six years old. Elizabeth's servant, Maggie—dark-skinned, foreign and gifted in the herbal arts—lives out back in the root cellar and exercises a mysterious power over the men in the village. Her affair with a rum smuggler and Eve's ill-fated marriage to an architect provide the novel's romantic tension. The story is told in a patchwork of voices, mostly from the perspective of the three women and the men whose lives they touch, but also from the point of view of various secondary characters and even the hurricane itself. Though intermittently lyrical, Tripp's breathy prose all too often descends into garbled metaphor ("he has eaten the pages of the books he reads"; "she had been a capsized spirit—not meant for the soft-boiled life of the city"). The wealth of sensory detail cannot make up for the stagnant plot, which moves at a snail's pace and renders the storm almost anticlimactic. Agent, Bill Clegg. New England author tour. (July 15)