conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled Where the Sea Used to Be about Dudley's, Loyal, Mountains with the genre: Literature & Fiction, United States.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author has already proved himself to be a master of the short form, producing both stellar fiction (<a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0395877474/${0}"> In the Loyal Mountains </a>) and eloquent polemical pieces (<a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0395877466/${0}"> The Book of Yaak </a>). The loose and baggy expanse of the novel, however, is new terrain for him. In an Amazon.com interview, the author described his struggles with Where the Sea Used to Be , which involved 14 years of intermittent labor and thousands of discarded pages. Reading the book, it's easy to see why. the author's first novel is a massive work. Encapsulating motifs from his entire career, it revolves around an elaborate love triangle (or perhaps quadrangle), the permutations of which would take a short pamphlet to describe. On the most basic level, however, there's Old Dudley, a crusty petroleum geologist; his daughter Mel, who's spent the last two decades studying wolves in Montana's Swan Valley; Matthew, a former protg of Dudley's; and Wallis, Dudley's current protg, who he's sent to the valley in search of oil, oil, and more oil.