The Pragmatic and the Grotesque

A Review of Mary Akers’s Bones of an Inland Sea

Upon encountering the first story in Mary Akers’s Bones of an Inland Sea (Press 53, 2013), one might expect the author’s second collection to dive into the haunting and fantastical. It is 1886. Madeleine, the narrator, has just washed up on a Florida beach after surviving the wreck of her husband Alonzo’s ship. She finds herself at the “House of Refuge,” which aptly doubles as the story’s title, and is visited by her husband’s ghost by way of a mysterious puddle that first appears outside the door of her room, then inside her room, and finally in her bed. The haunting that pervades these interwoven stories, however, is a pragmatic sort, arising from characters who grapple with stern realities both in occupation and in love. A far-flung cast of marine scientists and their spouses, lovers, and offspring, along with animals, populate this extended family saga, the encounters—both human-tohuman and human-to-animal—disenchanting if not heart-wrenching. Akers renders her world with clear-eyed specificity and assuredness, and no wonder: she is cofounder of the Institute for Tropical Marine Ecology. Dominica, the Institute’s original location, serves as one of the stories’ settings. Akers’s science- and academia-minded characters, including a lesbian who becomes transgender, are reminiscent of those in E.J. Levy’s Love, In Theory, though Akers’s structure is more overtly linked, her variety of protagonists, points of view, tenses, and a family tree that stretches across time bearing a more striking resemblance to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. A number of the stories in Bones of an Inland Sea hearken back to Florida, but the settings vary; the peninsula almost serves as a respite for the crises the characters encounter elsewhere, from Niagara Falls to the Red Sea to Phuket—which is perhaps why, in addition to its being the book’s earliest story and most resonating, Akers placed “House of Refuge” at the beginning. In capturing a physical crisis and the grotesque that often results, Akers deftly builds suspense, and her prose, as matter-of-fact as her characters, hits the mark. Consider this passage from “House of Refuge,” in which the shipmates have found a body, possibly Alonzo’s, on the beach: