Janice Pariat's Seahorse begins with the day on which a man named Nicholas disappeared, leaving his younger lover, Nehemiah, a college student in New Delhi who is the narrator of this tale. Who Nicholas is, and why he is important to Nehemiah, is slowly revealed.
Nicholas was an art historian, whose entry into Nehemiah's life upended everything the student thought he knew. Their unequal affection, the way Nehemiah's awe amused and pleased his older lover, reveals Nehemiah's youthful naïveté, which Pariat describes with a skilled touch of wonder and discovery. She intensifies the distance between these two lovers by alluding to the myth of Poseidon and Pelops with water imagery and other references. The role Nicholas played in the younger man's life begins to unravel as Nehemiah deconstructs his memories of the man he'd worshipped. Nicholas had his secrets, as do other characters throughout the story, yet Nehemiah's nearly childlike innocence leaves him oblivious to the layered lives of his companions. After Nicholas vanishes unexpectedly, Nehemiah feels confusion and, even after years have passed, is unable to move beyond his brief affair, hoping Nicholas will re-enter his life.
Pariat's choice to tell this story using a retrospective narrator allows her to tease out each character's secrets. In this way, she elicits empathy for them and reveals them as wonderfully complicated and flawed people, giving the story a quiet tone of inevitable melancholy. The mystery surrounding each of them propels the narrative forward until the most intimate connections become clear. Seahorse portrays the beauty inherent in the impossibility of ever truly knowing another person. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company