Sarah Orne Jewett: ‘Deephaven’

 I can’t seem to call Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven a novel, though just about everyone else does.

Maybe it’s just my ear, but “novel” seems to imply at least the promise of a page-turning plot. Deephaven doesn’t have that. This isn’t a complaint. I usually prefer books whose authors are after something else.

I marveled at Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. It’s fiction, but if it had a plot, I missed it.

I loved W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. But if you read fiction for suspenseful plots, you’d be disappointed. Sebald said he tried to write prose fiction. The novel, he said, was alien to him.

Willa Cather said Death Comes for the Archbishop was not a novel.

I think Deephaven belongs in this crowd. Reading it was a bit like subscribing to a small town’s weekly newspaper. You learn the characters, the personalities, the philosophies of the residents. You learn to appreciate the local characters — the stalwart citizens, the eccentrics, the lunatics.

The two young women at the heart of this story are from Boston, and Deephaven, Maine, is a small town that was left behind economically when President Jefferson declared an embargo in 1807. It would have been easy for young women from Boston to have found Deephaven dull. Instead, they found it an adventure.

People in Deephaven found their lives interesting, but assumed that life in the even smaller community of East Parish was dull.

When the young women went to see what East Parish was like, they paid a social call on a woman who was insane. The visit wasn’t dull. 

• Sources and notes: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven was published in Boston by James S. Osgood and Company in 1877. Project Gutenberg published it in 2005 here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15985/15985-h/15985-h.htm.

For more on this line of thought, see “Give me fiction, but hold the novel,” Nov. 5, 2022.