Suspense lessons from a book that isn’t “suspense”

Amity Gaige’s SEA WIFE and its assured build to tragedy

I recently finished Amity Gaige’s 2020 novel, Sea Wife, and was utterly rapt by the reading experience. The book is exquisitely suspenseful, and yet I don’t see it being billed as “suspense” anywhere. The publisher, Knopf (PRH), calls it “Literary Fiction.” Amazon tags it as “sea stories,” “family life fiction,” and “literary fiction.” Goodreads has seven tags, one of which is “mystery” and another is “adventure,” but most lean literary.  I thought I’d write a piece with all the suspense lessons I learned from a book that, apparently, isn’t suspense.

Image from Amazon

A simple explanation for this choice of words could be reader expectations: when I pick up a book marketed as “suspense,” I can’t help but expect the suspense to be related to something criminal, whether that crime occurs in the story’s set-up or fall-out. Sea Wife builds not to a crime but to a tragic death (a reality that is apparent from early on; I don’t think this is a spoiler!). In Sea Wife, Amity Gaige reminded me that a reader–that’s me–can feel exquisite suspense in the build to an event with no murder, mayhem, or moral afront.

The setup of the story is this: a restless husband convinces his dissatisfied wife to go sailing for a year with their two young children. In his captain’s log, the husband chronicles their adventure and reflects on their marriage. Months after the voyage’s end, the wife grieves the tragedy that struck while they were living at sea and reflects on her husband and marriage from a place of loss. The story moves back and forth between these points of view as the captain’s log draws to an end and disaster looms.

Here are my observations on how Gaige creates, maintains, and builds suspense in this highly suspenseful, non-suspense story.

Make good use of structure

Gaige’s use of structure is precisely what makes this story suspenseful.

The two main points of view of this book are Juliet’s and Michael’s, each of which is taking place during that character’s present experience. Juliet speaks from a point in time after the sailing trip; Michael speaks in a log book he keeps as they sail. Let’s call these times before and after, just for shorthand.

Juliet’s point of view puts the bomb under the table: from minute one she is clearly grieving a catastrophic loss, and within a matter of chapters, the reader knows with certainty that the loss is of Michael’s life. This knowledge makes every one of Michael’s points of view suspenseful, because the reader doesn’t know what will go wrong, only that it will.

It’s a Yarn gif, baby!

Gaige toggles back and forth between their voices and timeframes, which reminds the reader over and over that tragedy draws near in the “before” portions of the book. Gaige occasionally adds a third voice: that of their young daughter, in sessions with the therapist Juliet hires for her in the after times. The after times weigh heavy, with a constant sense that they are indeed coming after a bomb has gone off in this family’s world.

If Gaige had structured the book differently, writing the story chronologically, it wouldn’t have been very suspenseful. Shocking and tragic, yes, but without the page-turning effect of knowing you are reading towards disaster. Then, after Michael’s death, I might have struggled to keep reading, with half a book left to go and full expectations that it would be depressing. 

There is an exquisite pain in waiting for a tragedy you know will come. Gaige’s structure gives the reader that gift. (And if you’re not an emotional masochist, kudos, you are probably a well-adjusted person. Maybe skip this book!)

Weave in a subplot that amplifies suspense

Gaige adds further tension with a criminal subplot that’s introduced in the second half of the book: Michael’s business partner is missing, and police believe he traveled to Cartagena to see Michael, based on emails the man sent. Both the police and Juliet know the two men’s relationship was fraught with disagreement over the future of the boat. Reading Michael’s captain’s log during the after times, Juliet discovers that the missing business partner did come to Cartagena, and Michael made vague but incriminating remarks in the log book. When the police learn that captains often keep log books, they come back to Juliet, asking for Michael’s.

And the rest of them are Tenor

Although it initially felt a little jarring to have this crime-focused subplot introduced to the story, it quickly tied in with the broader emotional themes of the book. Juliet describes her husband as being “pitiless” at times toward others, and she wonders if he could have been driven to the point that he hurt the other man. This characteristic of Michael’s–his pitilessness–is a point of contention in the marriage. He and Juliet vehemently disagree on politics, Juliet finding Michael to be apathetic to the needs and realities of other people (while Michael is obsessed with self-sufficiency and autonomy).

When writing a suspense novel (or maybe just a suspenseful novel), it seems wise to only include a subplot if it’s going to heighten the tension, rather than detract from it.

Sow little mysteries

Gaige wove small mysteries into the story besides the missing-business-partner subplot. One is a childhood wound that haunts Juliet, which grows clearer in definition as the book proceeds. Relatedly, in the before times, Juliet is estranged from her mother; in the after, her mother is living with her, helping her survive her grief. What happened between them and how they mended their relationship is another of many small yet impactful mysteries that kept me reading.

Capitalize on everyday suspense

Many aspects of life are suspenseful, and Gaige capitalized on that in the domestic aspects of her book. One such suspense is what will happen when two people who love each other, or at least loved each other, become entrenched in conflict.

At one point, Juliet reflects: “I wanted to be done with the suspense of marriage.” For Juliet, whether or not they would remain partners was an open question, and not knowing the answer began to feel unbearable to her. Gaige’s writing made me remember the very human desire to shut down suspense when it’s happening in our real lives: for Juliet, this meant craving separation from Michael so that she wouldn’t have to bear waiting to see if they managed to avoid it. (Which she reflects on from the position she never anticipated: that of a widow.)

The whole book is infused with these reality-based dramas, many of which are just as “big” as the question of whether a character will literally survive a story. Will Juliet manage to live in spite of her grief? Are her children going to be traumatized, as Juliet feels traumatized by a childhood wound of her own? Because Gaige made me care about the characters, I couldn’t stop turning the pages in search of the answers to those questions.

Don’t discount setting

Most of the accounts of the before times take place on the sailboat at sea, which provides great opportunities for tension and stress (in addition to gorgeous, fantasy-like descriptions of faraway places). Even knowing that Juliet and the children survive the sailing trip, I felt incredibly stressed whenever a squall rose up and the pair of novice sailers had to try to keep the ship afloat. When the book reaches the end of Michael’s life, for me at least, the situation was almost unbearably tense as I tried NOT to imagine what I would have done in Juliet’s shoes.

Although Gaige got much more out of her settings than tension alone, she absolutely used the realities of life on a sailboat to make the story even more thrilling.

Second most thrilling drama that involves sailing

To recap:

• choose your structure carefully

• make that subplot suspenseful

• sow little mysteries

• use everyday life suspense to your advantage

• use your setting well

And I’ll add a lesson Andromeda taught us last week: study the books you read!

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If you’ve read Sea Wife, did I miss any suspense lessons?