Thoughts on Books: Thirst for Salt
Thoughts on Madelaine Lucas’s Thirst for Salt (Tin House, 2023)
Love might seem like an overwrought subject, but in Thirst for Salt, Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel (Tin House, March 2023), the unnamed narrator sinks her teeth into the meat and gristle of modern, romantic entanglement. With intricate prose and the luxurious unfolding of a summer at the beach, the narrator examines a past love affair through the melancholic lens of memory. She is not coy about the outcome of her relationship—it will end, has already ended—but the haunted echoes of this lost love are enough to propel the story into an intimate excavation of what it means to be a woman in conversation with her past self.
“It’s hard to remember that I was once that girl, lying in the sand in my red swimsuit and swimming late into the day. Sharkbait, he called me.”
Time is linear but memory is not, and each remembered moment is a snapshot braided into a kaleidoscopic composite of past and present. The story opens to a present where the narrator still carries the weight of all the possibilities of her once imagined life, now forever gone in the shifting landscape of choices and consequences.
“This is what happens when you break one life to live another—it causes a doubling…Some part of you is always in conversation with that other self.”
The narrator is defined by an embodied sense of unbelonging. Her mother tells her “you tend your loneliness like a garden.” It is a place she is comfortable, where she has found solace during her unmoored and unpredictable childhood. But on the cusp of fully entering adulthood the same loneliness that kept her company is now an invisible barrier to a life of deeper connection.
* * *
The narrator is on vacation after graduating from university—adrift in the ocean as she is adrift in her life—swimming into deeper water, searching for what she isn’t sure of yet. Jude is nearly twenty years her senior, but when she sees him in the water he captivates her with the gravity in which he undeniably belongs to the world he inhabits:
“There was a power in walking down the street with him, the way he carried himself like the world’s beloved son, whereas I had always felt like its illegitimate daughter.
The narrator wants to exist in the world with the same potency, but the promise of belonging is inextricably intertwined with the possibility of loss. While she indulges in the pleasure of this new relationship—reading poems in the backyard, eating fruit ripe from the farmers market, being the object of someone’s desire—she must be careful with wanting too much—she will concern her friends, her mother, spook her lover with the depth of her need. Longing, but not just for another—to be of a place, to own a piece of earth rooted in permanence. The narrator is desperate to be understood by those around her in order to fully understand herself: “I wanted to belong at Sailors Beach the way he did, calling trees, clouds, birds by name.”
Jude is the emblematic figure of the permanence she has yearned for but never found. But there is a cost to perpetuity, just as there is a cost to untethered freedom. The unraveling of their different desires creates a struggle for power as two separate people try and create space for unfamiliar contours. The narrator has a desperate need to be the one her lover will finally choose, once and for all—but when there a is need, it can always be exploited.
“Desire, I was only beginning to understand that day at the ruins, comes in many forms, and some of them are violent. We learn this in the stories we are told about love. Struck by an angel’s arrow or drugged by a loveflower, desire wounds, and I had felt its blue sting. The thought of him all day, like pushing on a bruise.”
Violent is a compelling word to place alongside love. I found this idea of violence mirrored in a later scene; the narrator wakes to find Jude moving through the house naked. He goes to the kitchen to make them breakfast and she follows, also unclothed. When he turns to find her, his reaction is to tell her to cover up—what if the neighbors see you?—and in that interaction her body deserves less space than his. Her flesh is something that must be covered up, while his has every right to exist the way that it is, moving with authority and without shame. This quiet erasure of a female body leads the narrator to wonder what parts of herself she must surrender for the right to belong in his world: “What kind of woman would I have to be to keep him?”
The narrator must cede a piece of herself for the security and belonging she so deeply craves. But Jude is not a bad man, he is arguably a good one, and yet the narrator’s needs are a burden to him; as long as she does not ask for too much she is allowed to exist in his world. It is this quiet, commonplace erasure of the female body that is often masqueraded as love—it is hard to define and therefore easy to ignore. Husbands and fathers and lovers taking up arms to defend the body that they have been conditioned to see as weaker. A body that they have every right to cover up. Yet that body only requires covering because of the power men exert over it.
“Though maybe it was a female thing, I thought later, to feel vulnerability where a man might have felt power, but still I longed to see him cracked open under my hands in return, while I remained clothed and composed.”
Her desire is in conflict with itself. She wants the life they are creating, and yet she will always exist in its shadow. To fully belong she must conform to fit the shape that he is willing to accept in his life. It is a small yielding, one that is often ignored in the lexicon of gender hierarchy—it is easier to talk about wage inequality and violence against women because those are defined by quantifiable metrics. Yet the quiet sacrifices women must make to exist in a male world are no less harmful because they are all rooted in the same violence; a culture that is comfortable exploiting female flesh for the sake of male autonomy.
* * *
Despite the narrator’s choice to finally leave, the possibility of this past version of her life still haunts her:
“There must be people out there who are not drawn to the shadow of what could have been, who feel no pull toward the other lives they could be living, but I certainly have never been one of them.”
It is unsettling but true—all the lives we might have lived if time and choices had been different. But for every path left untouched, there will always be others. There is beauty in belonging, and also in the untethered freedom of starting over. Thirst For Salt is not about the ending of love, but the enduring of it, that while “[s]ome desires have no resolution” belonging is not a fixed concept but an ever-changing conversation between who we are and who we will become.
