You start by building a strong back, a long wooden beam.
It begins with an epigraph, from mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani: “There are some times when I’m in a big forest and I don’t know where I’m going. But then somehow I come to the top of a hill and I can see everything more clearly. When that happens it is really exciting.”
So, you should know: you’re heading into the forest now. Anticipate an uncharted climb.
You mount the furnished uprights to your strongback and then mount two frames to the uprights.
The narrative begins with Jamie’s memories, then alternates between thirteen-year-old Jamie’s voice and the voice of his teacher Tess.
You temporarily attach the stringers (the long piece of wood that run from one end of the boat to the other) to the two frames and then start inserting frames.
Both voices throb with the kind of detail that makes you flip to the writer’s bio, convinced they’re both a thirteen-year-old boy and a married teacher in county Galway, Ireland.
Next, trim the ends of the stingers to fit the bow and stern.
Jamie endlessly rewatches a two-minute-and-eight-second-long video of Noelle at a school swim-meet, years before she would become his mother, before she would die giving birth to him; he believes his uncanny mathematical skill can be employed to build a Perpetual Motion Machine to connect him to his mother. At last.
Tess has repeatedly engaged in IVF and contemplates one final attempt; she believes that conceiving and raising a family will finally secure her future with her husband and her identity as a caregiver and their identity as a family. One last time.
Once that is done you start to lash the frames together.
The two characters’ lives grow increasingly enmeshed as Tess is assigned to monitor Jamie at school, his progress and his struggle to navigate the gap between his experiences of the world and most other students’ experiences. And the questions that Jamie poses challenge Tess’ expectations and accentuate a gap between what she has always imagined herself wanting and what she truly desires.
You sand and do any touch ups that are necessary at this point. Then oil the frame and it’s ready for the skin.
The scenes (at school, at home), relationships (between students, between lovers), language (dialogue unmoored, interior musings proliferating) and style (often poetic, occasionally distanced) are vivid and rich. The construction seems effortless, which suggests an exacting attention-to-detail and gradual, methodical accumulation of tension—embodied in the characters’ urgent pursuits, as they move from paralysis to readiness.
Once your skin is sewn on you have to seal (waterproof) it.
Each character’s experiences escalate, a sense of confinement slowly swelling, until it seems that their sense of breathlessness is yours. Nothing really happens, but everything actually happens, and there is a boat after all, and you were in it the whole time. And when you turn the final page, you feel as though you’ve been prepared for a journey that you didn’t know you were taking, in a quiet but determined fashion—and there is hope where there was none before.
Then you just add any deck rigging, a seat and back band and off to the water you go.
[Note: Thanks to KudzuCraft for the inspiration I found in their Basics of Building Boat page for writing an experimental review of Elaine Feeney’s How to Build a Boat (Biblioasis, 2023).]