Review: The Weight of Water

Post #100 - Wow.

I just finished reading The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve, as part of a reading assignment given to me by my newest friend, Janie Harrison. I need to focus my attention on a particular genre, and my reading selections vary greatly. So Janie is having me read good fiction in order to determine what interests me most.

Shreve's book is interesting. My first reaction from the initial pages was complete awe and admiration for her prose. Shreve sees a person for the thousand details that compose her. One particular passage that impressed me was on page 77, where she describes a photograph that the narrator had taken of herself and her family. Shreve literally captures a moment in time, and reads the expressions and gestures of each person in the picture. I read that passage many times, as I did also with many others. She is a wonderful writer with a gift for scene painting.

This is really two stories told in parallel, but both share a common theme of jealousy and impending tragedy. The first is told from the perspective of Jean; a photographer who receives a commission to photograph the scene of a hundred year old double murder on a small island on the Isles of Shoals thirty miles off the Atlantic coast between New Hampshire and Maine called Smutty Nose. She shares close quarters on a sail boat, captained by her brother-in-law Rich, with her husband Thomas, five year old daughter Billie, and Rich's girlfriend Adaline. Jean's relationship with her husband is rocky at best; whose attention to Adaline becomes increasingly overt, causing a tension that builds to a breaking point that promises to mirror that of the tragedy Jean is investigating.

The second story is that of murders themselves. Jean finds a journal written by the only survivor of the Smutty Nose murders, a Norwegian immigrant named Maren Hontvedt, who lays out the tale from start to finish of what really happened on that fateful night. Maren describes her childhood in Norway, how she came to marry her husband John, and how they were enticed to move to America, where fish were so plentiful one needed only to reach into the ocean and pull one out. But the reality of course turned out to be quite different. Maren was close to her brother Evan, to the point of possible incest, but that urge was never acted upon. Maren and Evan are found in innocent embraces, which are mistaken as inappropriate, which causes others to separate them, and plants the seed of suspicion in the mind of Maren's sister Karen. Eventually, Karen moves in with Maren on the island of Smutty Nose, then so too does Evan--but Evan brings with him his new wife, the lovely Anethe.

And so we have parallel stories running similar course. Anethe is Adaline, Jean is Maren, and Thomas is Evan. Jean and Maren are jealous, and all live in close, cramped quarters in extreme conditions, all in the harsh climate of Smutty Nose. Both stories are heading for tragedy, one of which we know will end badly, and the other, by implication, must also do.

The theme of water, as it seems to me, is a metaphor for guilt, which must in both cases the narrator feels can be shed by sharing the story with others. Maren eventually confesses her own guilt in her journal, which is particularly egregious because she let an innocent man hang for it. Jean on the other hand, doesn't seem to have much to confess. She is convinced that Thomas and Adaline are having an affair, which any reasonable person on this planet would also assume to be true. A storm ravages the sailboat and Adaline is swept overboard. Jean feels that if she had acted instead of hesitating, she might have saved her. That was her big crime. The tragedy of present day is that Billie, Jean and Thomas' daughter, is drowned instead of Adaline, who is retrieved and resuscitated. The affair turns out to be all in Jean's imagination.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. The style of skipping between past and present was a little distracting for me, but I understand that we are in the mind of Jean, who is obsessed with the past, and so we follow along with her mind as it flits back and forth. I'm not sure it worked, but the book has been adapted to a movie, so somebody else certainly thought so.

In my humble opinion, Shreve fell short at the end. I think she wanted to trick the reader by dropping the bomb that an affair had never occurred, but the evidence was damning to the accused. Nope. I didn't buy it, and I doubt most readers did either.

This a good read from a great author, but the ending of the present day account was a let down. Historically speaking, this was well researched and a clever fictional interpretation of an actual murder case, one that has been the subject of much debate. The ending was weak, but not so much to overshadow a truly brilliant piece of work.