Jul 16, 2004  |  By: Adrian Brune  | COMMENTS     

THE BEAUTY OF writing comes in the details for lesbian author Stacey D’Erasmo, and she has taken great pains to capture them all in her elegant new novel, “A Seahorse Year.”

Three years into writing the story about a family’s transformation over the mental breakdown of an adolescent boy, she approached the final episode: a dramatic departure to the woods of Northern California. But she had reached a point in which her characters and scene lacked the “thickness” she desired.

So D’Erasmo packed her bags, booked a flight from New York to San Francisco, and with girlfriend in tow, “drove the roads my characters would drive, camped in the forest where my characters would camp, and was even assaulted by an apocalyptic swarm of mosquitoes.” This all was in an effort to relay their disparate experiences more accurately.

D’Erasmo’s technique worked well for the follow-up novel to “Tea,” her highly acclaimed debut and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. “A Seahorse Year” does not dazzle you with intricate plotlines or necessarily keep you on the edge of your seat, though the story is quite compelling. It simply lands you squarely in a narrative comprised of four characters dealing with myriad life issues, and a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

The book opens with Hal Cooper, a gay accountant who outgrew his bohemian dream of becoming a singer, walking through a San Francisco neighborhood and reciting in his mind, “My son is mad.” He feels like he’s dying inside over the disappearance of 16-year-old Christopher, a golden-haired boy he fathered on a whim with Nan Ashby, his lesbian friend from the beatnik years.

Now, Christopher has run away and Hal is trying to remain stoic. Nan slowly grows wild with worry, tempered only intermittently by her longtime girlfriend, Marina, an artist consumed with minutiae.

Finally, Christopher calls from Phoenix, after a whirlwind trip across the Southwest, and the family’s life-altering journey begins with Nan bringing her troubled child home.

“Nan feels as if she is driving a bomb through Phoenix, as if she is carrying a bomb through the Phoenix airport, as if she is smuggling a bomb onto the airplane,” the author writes. “It’s clear to Nan that she cannot tinker with or ask the bomb any questions till she has him home.”

The three adults treat the teenager delicately until he has a suicidal episode under Hal’s watch. While Christopher recovers in a mental hospital, doctors diagnose his schizophrenia.

The novel subsequently chronicles the family’s confrontations with drugs, institutions and denial, until Christopher decides that he has had enough and runs away to Northern California, assisted by his girlfriend, a sensitive young woman raised by a psychotherapist.

The circumstances in the novel’s climax force all the characters to face Christopher’s inextricable madness and, in doing so, re-examine the nature of their ties to each other. D’Erasmo weaves “A Seahorse Year” together with a series of rotating perspectives in which characters relate their outlooks through intimate thoughts or actions.

D’Erasmo took on an almost impossible task by trying to keep the story moving along with these alternating viewpoints. But the final product reveals a graceful story about a troubled child and his flawed family, successfully depicting how life’s sudden challenges force a conformist adulthood upon even its most strident opponents in San Francisco’s iconoclastic utopia.