The Plot of John Jeremiah Sullivan's First Novel
In the same way he had sat in his small employee cabin bunk drawing Kentucky, the man finds himself every night in a small apartment in Lexington drawing pictures of the sea.
In the heart of every essayist lives a novelist, and after a dozen failed attempts—and countless conversations with the ghost of Andrew Nelson Lytle—John Jeremiah Sullivan finishes Field and Sea, a novel of some length about a man from Kentucky who takes a job on a cruise ship and spends a decade at sea patiently waiting on oceangoing tourists and sketching from memory the fields and horses of his childhood. He is affable and quiet and doesn’t see much of the world. The man returns home after that decade and finds he can speak only haltingly about his time on the Big Ship.
In the same way he had sat in his small employee cabin bunk drawing Kentucky, he finds himself every night in a small apartment in Lexington drawing pictures of the sea. He moves to Covington to live in his brother's spare room and takes to wandering at night along the Ohio River instead of drawing. But he's not mournful or lonely. He waits tables and goes for walks with his nieces. Near the end of the book he and his brother get caught in a storm driving home to see family. Their car gets stuck beside a field. The rain lets up, but the lightning continues. And in the light of the lightning strikes they watch the horses run. The field watches the brothers and remembers them.
Sullivan can’t figure out how to close the final chapter. He tries to call forth the past and future of that place in the voice of the field. The brothers recede to a distant corner, watched over by Lytle’s ghost.