The Inland Sea

the long version

"The Inland Sea is a poignant novel told in a series of twelve intricately connected stories depicting twenty-five years in the life of Vincent Torno and the extremes of family and landscape that shape and haunt him.". "Vincent Torno is the youngest child in an Italian-American family living in California's San Joaquin Valley. With a World War II veteran-businessman father whose conception of a logical ordered world is both oppressive and reassuring, and a mother whose never-discussed mental illness and recurrent breakdowns crash through the family like waves, Vincent is a boy whose desire for understanding is particularly acute. But as he moves out into the world - to the Midwest, Seattle, Manhattan - he finds it hardly more comprehensible than his own family. And that which seemed most stable - the landscape of his once agricultural hometown - is transformed with disorienting rapidity." "The Inland Sea chronicles Vincent Torno's twisting journey to a time when he finally comes to grips with the hard, hazardous, and always unsettling work of love and forgiveness."--BOOK JACKET.