By the Iowa Sea A memoir

Review by New York Times Review

If there's a sea in Iowa, we're dealing with either a natural disaster or a metaphor of oceanic proportions. In this case it's both, as Blair recounts a marital crisis against the backdrop of the storms that ravaged the state in the spring of 2008. A memoirist with a poet's soul, he takes what is arguably the most mercilessly exploited natural resource in all of literature and replenishes it. And he manages the feat in territory that could scarcely be more familiar: the storm surge of unruly passion and the lure of adultery at heterosexual midlife that threaten to undo a family. Yet this turns out to be no ordinary family. Blair has an autistic son, Michael, who gives these confessions their energetic spark. Virtually bereft of language, captive to the compulsions of his ineducable and untamable consciousness, Michael screams and stomps, pulls feces from his rectum, fingers roadside clay in inexhaustible fascination. The world is always new to him; he is permanently innocent of taboo and cliché. He is his wayward artist-father's son, and as such it is their love story, more than that between Blair and his wife, that lends the tempest and its longed-for destructiveness their emotional valence, and this memoir its observational virtuosity. Paul Festa is a writer and filmmaker. His work has appeared in The Daily Beast, Nerve, Salon and other publications.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 8, 2012]

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Review by Booklist Review

What Blair, in a first full-length offering from this Iowa Writers' Workshop grad, pitches is the true story of how, in the summer of 2008, his marriage reached a breaking point in time with Iowa's swollen rivers. While there isn't much new about Blair's struggles paying a mortgage versus fulfilling his writer's dreams, falling for the other woman, and the nagging wonder: How did I get here? he convinces, without hinting that he's trying to, that his feelings and trials are unique. What he survives during the flood could certainly be called a disaster, but Blair doesn't count himself among its victims. He writes, The use of this term suggests that there is a perpetrator, and who else but the river? . . . And no one talks about the people who were saved by the flood. In rhythmic and digestible prose, the page space that Blair fills in expounding on the microcosmic (sandbagging the river's banks; moments with his four children, and, in particular, his son with severe autism; a breakfast at the quintessential roadside diner) is where the book's greatest beauty can be found.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Blair, a pipe fitter and freelance writer living in Iowa, writes that he once prayed to God at age 10 to send him his challenge, but never did he think there would be so many of them, with a faltering marriage and four children, one of them autistic. Years earlier, ever the dreamer and adventurer, the then 20-something author, with his newlywed bride, Deb, on the back of his motorcycle, took a page from his favorite film, Easy Rider, and set out to explore the country. The adventures of the trip remain the high point of Blair's often frustrating life, because nothing goes the way he dreams, and often his grandest schemes and plans derail horribly. All of the highs and lows of early marriage, the major joys and miscues of youth and commitment, give way to the stresses and responsibilities of remaining a viable family, which Blair depicts in a lyrical, vivid voice. Eventually, however, flirtations and interludes with other lovers undermine the stability of the couple's relationship, pressured by parenting and a bland marital routine. However, Blair's thoughtful memoir displays the strength and resilience of committed lovers in a tumultuous relationship. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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By the Iowa Sea IT BEGINS WITH RAIN. An innocent enough thing. Rain and rain and rain. Day after day of it. Through February and March and April and May. Forcing us to seek out shelters that will soon, in some cases, be transformed into pontoon boats. While the rain beats down on the roofs of Iowa City and Cedar Rapids and Marengo and Oxford Junction like bouncing hammers, the unstoppable thing is happening. The rivers rise up out of their banks, lifting our neat little split-entry lives from their foundations, tearing away electrical hookups and gas hookups and phone lines, bringing us to a place where there are no riverbanks and no street names and nothing else that resembles a city. The rivers will become oceans. And Deb and I will become not lost in the oceans but a part of them: suddenly vast. Subordinate to none. Scooping and hungry. The wind comes unevenly in cold down-rushes and everyone at the Coral Ridge Mall knows that something unusual is about to happen. If the raindrops were chickens or pancakes, I don't think we would be surprised. Because anything is possible. The small trees outside Barnes & Noble are showing the undersides of their leaves, their branches confused as to which way to go, pushing downward and then upward and then twisting clockwise. People are gathered in the very place the voice on the intercom tells us not to gather: in front of the large plate-glass windows. We can see everything from here. The crosswalk sign bending sideways. The racing clouds. But it isn't enough for me. I want to be in the storm. I want to smell it and hear the wind and feel the first enormous raindrops hit my skin. I'm hungry for that. I push through the heavy doors and wait outside the entrance. The storm excites me. It excites us all. Even though we have worried expressions on our faces, we don't move from the windows. Because we want the change to come. We all want it. We are on our phones to wives or husbands or children. "Are you in the basement?" "Stay inside!" "Stay away from the windows!" These are the things we say. The sky looks the way ocean waves must look from the bottom of the sea. We are starfish looking up at the waves. And it intrigues us that there is such power in the world. Power enough to twist trees like corkscrews. To rip us all up by the roots. A blast of wind staggers me. I catch myself from falling by grabbing the crosswalk sign, itself less than stable, oscillating wildly on its channeled steel post. One drop, the size of my hand, in the middle of the crosswalk. Another drop somewhere on the sidewalk. Then hundreds of drops all at once. Then thousands. Falling hard. Drawn to the ground as if by magnetic force. I step back beneath the entrance, afraid. The hunched figure of a woman rushes through one of the double doors clutching a paper bag to her chest and holding one hand over her head, as if to keep her wig on. "Smells like rain!" she shouts over the sound of the mad charge of water from the sky as she bustles past me into the storm. I smile. I take a deep breath. And then I laugh. Because she's right. It does smell like rain. Excerpted from By the Iowa Sea: A Memoir by Joe Blair All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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