The Weight of Water

The Weight of Water - Anita Shreve I couldn't warm to this book. I think it tries too hard, it feels affected, insincere. It's mostly told from the perspective of Jean. She's a photographer sent to get photographs of Smuttynose, Maine, part of the Shoal Islands near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In 1873, it was the setting of a gruesome double murder, so she visits the island accompanied by her husband, five-year-old daughter and her brother-in-law and his girlfriend. The novel is mostly written in a first person present voice that after far too many recent reads of literary fiction, I associate with an overreaching attempt at lyricism. I don't want to give the idea I always hate this technique--it can lend not just lyricism but an immediacy to a narrative if done well, but this felt strained to me, maybe because of the way from the beginning it bounced manically from paragraph to paragraph to the present to the past of the island to the background of Jean's relationship with her husband. When we reached the first part of a memoir from the one survivor of the murders discovered by Jean, I felt relieved to shift to that voice. But the relief didn't last too long, because I never really believed in the voice of Maren. For one, Maren claims to have included the text of another's letter by memory, then she closes the first part on how she's too tired to continue for now--both aspects of that narrative seemed very artificial. And as for the ultimate fate of that memoir... Well, what can I say? It didn't make me feel any more tender towards Jean. And how I felt about Jean, her husband and the other adults accompanying them? I never cared much. And in a first person narrative, especially one so obviously trying to break your heart, that's deadly. I found the novel depressing without ever being tragic in a cathartic way. I've never read Shreve before, and this novel doesn't make me want to read more of her.