“Low Tide” is the story of Jezebel, daughter of an English art-dealer and a mad Louisiana heiress, and her fatal love-affair with two young brothers. It takes place in New York, Oxford, and Mexico.
Excerpt from the book: Chapter One.
“My father left my mother when I was twelve and went back to London. I had always pictured that Mummy in turn would go home to Louisiana on this longed-for End of Days, for she had raised me on stories of the Great House at Terrebonne: a tottering Third Empire delirium of glory-be, giddy with pinnacles and cupolas, a house of cards which wailed in a high wind, swayed like a lily in a hurricane, and sweated and blistered under a noonday heat that was like the Hand of God coming palm down on you. And beyond its tiny preserve, mangrove swamp throbbing with mosquitoes and a river thick as mud whose motionless murk curvetted all the way to the Isles Dernieres. Mummy had fed me on these stories of the house and its doings, which were stories of the heart’s blood, as a pelican feeds its young, or so the legends say…But there was no such black bayou any more, no such house, only what she had invented to keep muggers out of her mind.
So we stayed on in New York after Daddy left, Mummy, Eustacius, and me, in a brownstone on East 94th Street, where nothing of mine was swept away. In the kitchen, the walls were decked with Halloween masks, steamed labels from Haitian cocoa powder, hot-colored fetishes. In the garden there were still the rotten spars of the tree house like a crazed aircraft pitched among the weeds.
When the tide goes way out, sometimes odd sea-things are stranded in the sand. Sea calves, sea horses, too-many-legged crabs. In the Renaissance, men thought everything on lnd had its sea-partner: sometimes we get drowned and they get beached. Jem and I, Mummy, Mrs. Palafox, Eustacius, are all such creatures—landed, salt-dried, and petrified in our monstrousness.”
“This is a bouillon cube of a book; it’s so condensed…[it] makes a meal for six…We view the action through a veil of sweat and tears, licking our lips so as not to miss the salt…’Low Tide’ is a book that leaves its mark.”
–Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, The New York Times Book Review
“Enchanting…Bursting with talent and love of life…It is [her] imagery that proclaims Eberstadt a major talent. Waugh said of Wodehouse, ‘One has to call anyone a Master who manages, on average, three quite original metaphors per page.’ Fernanda Eberstadt can manage three original metaphors per page—sometimes in a single paragraph.”
–Edmund Morris, Washington Post Book World
Fernanda Eberstadt writes:
“I wrote Low Tide in six weeks, staying in a house in Mexico, the summer after my first year at Oxford. The original was short and sweet; I was nineteen years old, and was scared that if I didn’t finish it quick, I’d get stage fright and dry up. I spent the next three years rewriting it. “’Low Tide’ got turned down by twelve publishers. My luck only turned when I persuaded my mother to lend me her agent, who then sent ‘Low Tide’ to Robert Gottlieb, the greatest editor in postwar America. Bob Gottlieb called me in to see him, and said he was going to publish the novel against his better judgment. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that. After he took over “The New Yorker,” he sent me to Palermo and Istanbul to write portraits of those gorgeous cities.”