Sara Freeman’s construction of a fragmented, formless and at times empty world in Tides (2022) is filled with a buoyant lyricism that keeps the prose moving in a manner resembling its title. Each page is its own lyrical segment, chapter-less and unique; a tribute to a woman drifting, purposefully, out to sea.

It is this lyrical quality which makes Freeman’s poetic prose a whirlwind of fresh feeling; a true insight into the life of an initially unnamed woman (who pretends to a group of maritime men her name is ‘Nada’, meaning ‘nothing’ in Spanish) who has fled her life in Michigan following the loss of her child. She separates from her husband who she pushes away in desperation and contempt; what appears to be a lifelong ritual of self-loathing.

Halfway through the novel we discover the protagonist’s name is Mara, a sibling to ‘Nada’ in its lengthy assonance. The drawn out vowels resemble Mara’s unabating hollowness described by the third-person narrator, who appears to subsume and become the protagonist through the drifting free indirect discourse.

It is in keeping with the lilting tone and circular style of the novel that Mara ‘was a child who loved repetition’; enjoys the sound of words being repeated to her over again. This is a character stuck in the words of the page — the assonance of her own name, even. Her father — mentioned sparingly in the text — would repeat certain words ‘over and again’:

And then when he couldn’t stand it anymore, he’d clap his hand. Ça suffit, ma belle. But that was after what felt like hours of play. That’s enough, my love.

Freeman’s rhythmic prose creates a tide relentless in its strength and monotony: Mara remains resolute in her desire for regulating repetition, necessary for some kind of stabilising of the self. It is only when Simon is deemed Mara’s tide that we see she cannot yet regulate her own ebbs and flows. She seems to be wanting us to tell her, ‘That’s enough, my love.’

Mara’s father’s repetitions clearly weren’t enough; neither are Simon’s. Both relationships end in absence and lacking. Indeed, the lack of repetition after Mara’s father leaves produces a gaping silence in the narrative, and Mara’s life. The text seems to ask: is the price of self-discovery pain? Is this why each time Mara becomes close to meaningful connection, a part of her unravels?

She used to think she could get any man to fall in love with her. Hah. It was a private game she used to play. You’re it, she’d say. And then she’d use her singular talent, her dangerous skill: pull just the right thread and let the whole self unspool.

The half-rhyme here, between ‘skill’ and ‘spool’, shows Mara’s singular talent is a skilful unspooling of the self. But is it Mara’s self that unspools with her manipulation of men? Or is ‘the whole self’ referring to the man of her choosing?

The text turns from one loss to another, but the persistent absence in the text is Mara’s miscarriage. The unmatched magnitude of the loss of an unborn child becomes distilled in the minutiae of Mara’s displaced existence. Small objects — and thought-provoking, unsettling descriptions of them — become everything; the only method through which Mara can leave tracks in her aimless path. The world of Tides is one where a lie becomes a penny; where rejection is ‘relief with a dollop of disappointment, a peppering of disbelief’; where a key becomes its own double to refute the slippery hold of yet another man trying to sexualise Mara’s existence:

When she returns, the man hands her the key, its double. You’re working for Simon over there, aren’t you. Poor fellow, what with the situation with his wife. She lies, tells him she didn’t know the boss was married. Didn’t even cross my mind to ask, she adds, buoyed by her own pretense, her own play.

The free indirect discourse wafts in and out of Mara’s consciousness; we, too, are playing the role of spectator, both ‘buoyed by her own pretense, her own play’ and dubious of this somewhat two-dimensional male character who seeks to understand her undefined relationship with Simon:

What’s that expression? Don’t shit where you eat? the old man banters. She laughs, tells him he’s right, she does like to keep things tidy. You’re a good girl, then, he says. Let the old man think what he thinks.

There are many layered meanings to this encounter, and the way it is written. With the dialogue separated from the narration — and the narration of Mara’s thoughts — through italics instead of speech marks, Freeman shrugs off typographic convention.

The bitter irony of the old man’s comment, ‘Don’t shit where you eat’ (Mara is in fact working and living in secret in Simon’s deli; she is also sleeping with him) turns from a sexual reference to an evaluative judgement of character: ‘You’re a good girl, then’. But Mara’s ability to ‘Let the old man think what he thinks’ seems to signal the pleasure of allowing others’ contempt, judgement and false stories without letting them rule your existence. For Mara, lies and truth are paramount — perhaps even one and the same thing:

This is a familiar feeling: holding the truth and its opposite so near, tête-à-tête, a child dangling two dolls by the plastic scruff of the neck, orchestrating animated talk. She walks out, both keys digging their teeth into her palm. She lets the small pleasure of her lie drop down, a penny at the bottom of a well.

I see Mara’s imagining (which is, textually, an imagining of the nameless narrator) as a reenactment of her own childlike state at a time where she has lost the role of mothering through stillbirth. Accordingly, it is not the child or the doll’s teeth she describes, but the key’s: ‘keys digging their teeth into her palm’. Mara is left not with a child — her equivalent to a doll — to play with, but the inanimate keys in her hand. The keys themselves are replicated to sustain a lifestyle where she slips in and out of a property above a shop owned by a man she falls in love with. She is the ‘penny at the bottom of a well’. But what feels unexpected about the novel is that Mara, the penny, gleams. She hasn’t fallen; she has been found.

Roots & Wings