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Waterborne: A Novel
By Bruce Murkoff
Knopf
393 pages
$25
The time is the Great Depression, and the place is the American West, a frontier still full of promise and opportunity -- for the desperate men and women willing to take a chance on an uncertain future. Engineers, builders, and architects are gathering to harness the power of the Colorado River by constructing the massive Boulder Dam. Joining them are the workers, waitresses, bootleggers, gamblers and prostitutes who come to capitalize on the prospect of plenty.
Filius Poe is one of the engineers. Not yet 30, he is a son of prosperity, an idealist whose vision of the world has already begun to collapse under the weight of circumstance and loss. Lew Beck is one of the laborers, full of rage and fueled by a bottomless wellspring of brutality. Lena McCardell, a woman "grateful for the simple connections that made her life ordinary and good," is the disillusioned young mother who unwittingly enters their lives.
The story unfolds deliberately, in no hurry to arrive at any of its narrative destinations. The author's flashbacks in time and place are occasionally as circuitous as a mountain footpath, but he weaves these skillfully through the alternating plotlines to expand and deepen the story.
Murkoff's writing is as rock-solid as the ground underneath his characters' feet and, at the same time, as elegant as a bird in flight. This author's command of language, coupled with the authority of his voice, creates sweeping currents of prose that transport readers far beyond the realm of the everyday: "The river begins, squeezed out of rock older than the earth itself, high in the snowdriven streams and alpine lakes of the Rocky Mountains, running clear and bright through the clenched fist of granite peaks. Finding its course, feeding off tributaries, for two thousand miles it cuts and shapes, hews and contours, gnaws and seeps through rock and soil, this magnificent gash in the American West....And with the westward expansion came visionaries and fools, optimists and clowns, to investigate the river and what it might do to nourish the arid reaches of the New World."
But he is equally sure-handed when describing the commonplace, such as his depiction of Depression-era women "angry about the things they'd lost during the long years of misery when money was scarce and they fought with their husbands and slapped their children and walked the streets in shabby coats and worn-out shoes and total shame."
Beyond superb writing, at the heart of any great drama are its characters, flawed and fumbling in their humanness. In Waterborne, the men and women who make history by exerting their collective will over the forces of nature are too often unable to control their own behavior. We know the lives of Lena, Lew and Filius are ultimately destined to collide, but this collision is months in the making. Readers impatient to reach the story's climax may find the wait for this resolution an excruciating one. Still, it's a tribute to Murkoff's storytelling expertise that he never falters along the way.
As progress on the dam reaches toward completion, the cost of its success grows higher as time, money and lives are lost. But everything has its price. Most everyone accepts a certain amount of risk when gambling on the future; Murkoff knows this, and he uses that knowledge brilliantly.
That mere mortals -- unable to change the course of our own lives -- would endeavor to change the course of an eons-old river, is a testament to our abiding ambition and faith. And it is those same qualities, so masterfully employed by author Bruce Murkoff, that make Waterborne a wondrous new novel.
Amy Rogers is a founding editor of Novello Festival Press, and the author of Hungry for Home: Stories of Food from Across the Carolinas.
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