Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller
Find it in a WorldCat library
Compare prices at major online bookstores
|
|
Review by Leah Odze Epstein
A double murder, circumstantial evidence, "the trial of the century. " Sounds familiar, but Anita Shreve's spellbinding new novel, The Weight of Water, is based in part on an actual crime that occurred not in this century, but in 1873 on Smuttynose Island, one of the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of New Hampshire.
On March 5, 1873, Norwegian immigrants Karen Christensen and her sister-in-law Anethe were axe-murdered in the home their sister Maren shared with her husband. Maren witnessed the murder, but miraculously escaped. She later accused a former boarder, who was tried, convicted, and hanged. Although the case was closed, "the matter of who killed [the women] has continued to be debated for more than a century," Shreve writes.
Seamlessly cutting between Maren's written recollection of the events leading up to the murder and present-day New England, Shreve sets the contemporary half of her story in motion when a magazine hires Jean, a photographer, to document the scene of the 1873 crime. Armed with "guidebooks, accounts of the murder, [and] a trial transcript," Jean, her poet husband, Thomas, and their five-year-old daughter Billie sail to Smuttynose from their home in Massachusetts with Thomas's brother Rich and his seductive lover, Adaline.
Jean quickly becomes consumed, not only with trying to understand the murder, "the random act, the consequences of a second's brief abandonment," but with questions she is increasingly asking herself: Why is Adaline reciting Thomas's poems to him? Is it her imagination, or was Thomas staring at Adaline's long, slender legs?
In the claustrophobic confines of the sailboat, tensions simmer beneath the surface, erupting in a torrent of impulsive actions, not unlike the split-second decision that drove someone to kill Karen and Anethe Christensen.
In The Weight of Water, as in the layered depths of Anita Shreve's other novels, Eden Close, Strange Fits of Passion, Resistance, and Where or When, the past is never just "water under the bridge." Rather, the sediment of submerged hurts, desires, and fears inevitably rises, roiling the surfaces of her characters' lives.
Shreve's triumph here is in creating a pace that brilliantly mimics the frenzy of one who acts in a moment of searing passion. A seasoned journalist and the author of several works of nonfiction, Shreve understands our all-too-human fixation on the "truth," and our imagination's tendency to fill in the blanks when the facts are unknowable.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.