The Weight of Water

Sometimes, when the everyday happenings of your personal life become a bit too exhausting, you just want to worry about someone else's problems. This is a common belief in the age of reality TV – why worry about my issues when I can worry about yours? I'll admit, I buy into it; but in a slightly less pathetic way than most my age. Yes, I should be packing or cleaning or applying to grad school. But how can I do that when I don't know how chapter six ends? Or what that word means? Or what that metaphor stands for exactly?

When looking for an escape, there is hardly anything better than what I call a “junk food read.” There are plenty of choices for slumming – pardon my English major ego here – depending on how far deep into the depths you're looking to go. If you'd like to be able to keep your prim and proper little nose in the air, you can check out the heavy hitters on the New York Times Best Seller list. There, you'll be likely to find an entertaining read that's still high quality. If you feel like putting on a floppy hat and a pair of huge sunglasses and taking the bus to a bookstore the next town over, you can pick up some Danielle Steele. There, you'll be likely to be swept up by the stable boy for a night of passion in the apple orchard. I settled somewhere in between and went for an author I knew would hand me an easy, interesting story with some predictable romantic drama and a little bit of a twist – Anita Shreve, author of the massive hit, The Pilot's Wife.

The Weight of Water (actually written before The Pilot's Wife) tells the story of Jean, a middle aged wife of a semi-successful poet and mother of nine year old daughter, Billie. Jean works as a photographer for The Boston Post, and the book finds her on assignment in the Isle of Shoals, a group of islands about ten miles away from the coasts of New Hampshire and Maine. Jean's husband, Thomas, has gained some minor success for his work – a few awards, a teaching position at Cambridge – but struggles in the way that many artists do. A series of his poems seems to have been well received, but we never learn much about them. At one point it is mentioned that Thomas, a quiet, dark, and obviously tortured soul (how else are poets ever depicted in fiction?) based these works off of an accident that occurred when he was a young man, in which he lost his first love. But the subject is touched upon so briefly and explained so poorly that it doesn't really justify any of his actions. We know nothing of his work, his past, or even much of Jean and Thomas' life together. Everything about their characters seems cliché and underdeveloped. The one thing we know for sure? Their marriage sucks. Oh, and that Thomas deals with his mediocre success through drinking, further alienating himself from his wife, who he barely seems to notice in the first place.

Trapped somewhere in the middle of this is the couple's daughter, Billie. Billie is outlined as a very typical, completely unremarkable nine year old girl. I pitied her throughout the novel, stuck on a houseboat for such a long trip, constantly being tossed back and forth between her parent's painfully awkward and rickety relationship. But Shreve sort of lets Billie slip through the literary cracks. For chunks of time, I flat out forget that the little girl is a character in the novel, so dense and brow-furrowing is the drama between her parents and their travel-guests.

There are two major subplots weaving in and around each other throughout Water. The first is present day. It travels along with Jean and her family as she tours the Isle of Shoals, photographing the location of a historical murder. In order to make the trip, they have agreed to travel with Thomas' brother, Rich, on his houseboat. Of course, a drama-mystery wouldn't be a true drama-mystery without a young and distracting woman! Enter Rich's girlfriend Adeline, a 25 year old goddess with lithe limbs, flawless locks, and an insatiable thirst for poetry. She is, of course, the complete opposite of Jean, an avid fan of Thomas' work, and seems to always be inexplicably clothed in only a bathing suit. Raise your hand if you already know where this is going.

The second plot takes place back in the late 1800's, outlining the historical event to which Jean has been assigned. In March of 1895 two women were brutally murdered on Smuttynose Island while a third survived; we follow along as their husbands return late that night to find the two women butchered and the third covered in blood. We make our way through this plot in uneven spurts that include sections of Maren Hontvedt (the survivor)'s personal journals, accounts from the murder trial, and facts tossed randomly in with the modern-day plot.

Because of the disjointed, uneven matter in which the plots are developed, I never really felt like I truly understood either of them. Just when I seemed to be getting a grip on the tension between Thomas and Jean, I was wrenched from the house boat and plopped back into the antique world of Maren and her uncomfortable relationship with her housemates. Then, I would finally ease into 1895 and begin to take an interest in the unending wind and rain off the coast of Maine, suddenly to find myself back in the 21^st century. I can only assume that the time traveling was meant to more deeply involve the reader, perhaps to keep them on their toes. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect on me – with each switch I felt more distanced from the story. Towards the end I was skipping around the novel from one section to the next so that I could attempt to read each plot uninterrupted, even if it meant missing some emotional or historical significance.

I know that there is supposed to be a connection between the murders that took place on Smuttynose and the relationships that are simultaneously forming and falling apart over a century later. Otherwise, why would Shreve be flipping the reader back and forth like a ping pong ball? But, try as I might, I still can't put my finger on it. It almost felt as if two books had been spliced and printed together on accident. Perhaps the two plots are linked through the brother characters – Maren has an inappropriate, confusing relationship with her brother Evan, while Jean is “accidentally” forming a romantic relationship with her husband's brother, Rich. But that seems like a stretch. The only thing those two sentences really have in common are the word “brother”. And, again, the plots are so frustratingly underdeveloped that I'm not sure I would catch the connection if it was being dangled in front of my nose.

From the very beginning, the author is heavy handed with the foreshadowing. Blaring, unignorable signs of an affair between Thomas and Adeline and thrown clumsily through the plot, and it begins to feel at some points like the author is beating you on the head. They're all trapped on a boat. There's sexual tension. We get it. Perhaps this overdose of awkwardness would make sense if the subplot ever lead to anything – but none of them ever do. Normally when a novel is chugging along, leaving you in the dark, it all comes together in the end. Unfortunately, The Weight of Water didn't even have the redeeming quality of a sturdy ending. It is, instead, a sudden plot twist that adds little to the storyline or the characters. It felt like a cheap move on Shreve's part, like she was trying to trick the reader into forgetting the first sub-par 200 pages.

What's even worse than the failed attempt at a Palahniuk-twist ending? Tacking on a final chapter that “casually” attempts to answer any lingering questions the reader might have. That was just embarrassing. I feel no need to mock it because I believe it successfully mocks itself.

Believe it or not, there were a few things about the book that I did enjoy. It went by quickly, if unremarkably. The writing itself was interesting and had a good pace. The murders Jean is researching really happened (although who knows if her telling of them is true), and I always like a good dose of history. The little of Thomas and Jean's relationship past that we see is a solid example of a couple getting married for the wrong reasons and living with the mistake for the rest of their lives, which is always intriguing. “I was always worried that you thought I was with you because of the poems. That I was using you. As a kind of muse,” Thomas says to Jean somewhere in a flashback scene. “Not now, Thomas.” She answers. And in some moments, Jean's jealousy of Adeline is relateable, her quips snippy and entertaining. I hope to never be trapped on a houseboat with a woman twenty years younger than me, who is drooling over my husband. But in case I am, I now have a standard of cleverness to live up to.

Another interesting thing about The Weight of Water is its portrayal of the modern-day photographer. Have you ever considered what it would like to be a photographer professionally, outside of weddings and Bar Mitzvahs? The life of a newspaper photographer is one we seldom delve into. Sure, there are the stories that just require a point and shoot, but through Jean we learn about the emotional, passionate sides of photography that aren't often seen. For me, it is sometimes easy to forget that photography is art. I mean that in the kindest of ways; I understand the importance of finding the correct light, color, angle, subject... I love photography and respect what little I know of it, but my knowledge of art isn't exactly extensive, and I generally picture a paintbrush or a collection of stick figures. Photography for me seems almost more mathematical, scientific even, than artistic. But following Jean's thought process as she attempts to capture a soul within a still frame is fascinating. The thought itself isn't new, but it is truly interesting to see it in juxtaposition with the loss of soul associated with murder.

“In Africa, when I was on assignment there, some Masai whom I met thought that if I took a photograph of them, and if I went away with that photograph, I would have stolen their soul. I have sometimes wondered if this can be done with a place... That soul is, of course, composed of the stories we have attached to a particular piece of geography, as well as of the cumulative moments of those who have lived on and visited [Smuttynose Island]. And I believe the soul of Smuttynose is also to be found in its rock and tufted vetch, its beggar's-ticks and pilewort, its cinquefoil brought from Norway. It lives as well in the petrels that float on the air and the skate that beach themselves – white and slimy and bloated – on the island's dark beach...”

Despite these few high points, The Weight of Water just didn't do it for me. It wasn't even as good as The Pilot's Wife, which itself wasn't anything fantastic (I actually think I left it in a New Zealand hostel last summer and filled its place in my hiking pack with Nutella sandwiches). If you're looking for a good “junk food read,” I would pass this one up. Unless you're somehow reading this from your houseboat floating around New Hampshire, you're better off with reality TV. And if you are floating around the Isle of Shoals, then you should probably go check on your daughter. (Spoiler alert. Whoops.)