Waterbaby: A Novel [Paperback]

Cris Mazza (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 28, 2007

As children, Tam and her older brother were swimming when she suffered her first epileptic seizure. He pulled her from the water and was crowned a hero. Tam was labeled “disabled” and never swam again. And so began 30 years of vigilance, never allowing her body to betray her, never allowing her brother or her family or anyone else to influence her path. Now, in middle age, a lifetime’s worth of control has taken its toll. Exhausted, she heads to Maine where, while working on a genealogy project, she falls under the spell of two dead women: an ancestor, Mary Catherine, who died at 33; the other, the town ghost. Through their cloistered, tragic lives Tam relives her own life over and over — until a distant cousin forces her to see herself in a new light. Tam’s quest to transcend self-imposed limitations is superbly crafted and richly satisfying.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Titled after the Charles Kingsley fairy tale, this dizzying novel opens on epileptic, prematurely retired Tam Marr-Burgess, who is pushing 46, and whose attempt to collude with her landlady in a minor fraud goes very bad. The result is an immediate, spectacular eviction. As Tam lights out from the Chicago suburbs, Mazza (How to Leave a Country) sets up several parallel narratives, each of which has echoes of the other: Tam is headed for the family enclave in Maine, where she had her first seizure when swimming at school, was either saved (the official story) or sabotaged (Tam's version) by her elder brother, Gary, and never swam again. On arriving, she rescues an infant from a Laundromat toilet, and then hides the baby and its petulant teen mother at the family lighthouse. She also joins her amateur genealogist sister, Martha, in digging up information on three mysterious figures: a baby saved from the waves by Tam's lighthouse-keeper ancestors, a relative named Mary Catherine, and a local ghost-all of whom may have things to tell them about their own lives. As multiple pasts spin out, Gary comes unglued and tries to make his problems Tam's, much as he did during her eventful college years. There are wry pleasures to be had in Tam's life and adventures, but Mazza puts too many oars in the surf and never gets them all in synch. (Oct.)
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Review

A gripping tale of compulsion, obsession, and forgiveness, set so evocatively amidst the fogs and furies of the offseason Maine coast. It's also an intriguing exploration of the ways in which our ancestral pasts echo within our own psyches. -- Lisa Alther, author of Kinflicks and Kinfolks

Shipwrecks, doomed lovers, family secrets, sea-babies, toilet-babies, and historical-reenactment sex are but a few of the facets of this deftly kaleidoscopic novel. With Waterbaby, Cris Mazza shows us how, through resuscitating our pasts, and rescuing each other, we might just save ourselves. -- Alex Shakar, author of Savage Girl

With the wickedly wry observation, 'Family is always best,' Chris Mazza pierces the heart of this big-hearted novel. Mean and funny and, ultimately, loving, WATERBABY is the pitch-perfect tale of an all-American family in gothic and comic splendor. This is a delightful and delightfully smart book. -- Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of An Almost Perfect Moment

[P]acks a lingering wallop. -- Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press (October 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933368845
• ISBN-13: 978-1933368849
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,411,563 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ecstatic Truths, November 3, 2007

By 

D. S. Libman "[e-mail]" (Illinois) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Waterbaby: A Novel (Paperback)

Filmmaker Werner Herzog has written, "There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization."

Cris Mazza takes this one step further with her seductive book Waterbaby, giving us a protagonist who seeks to create a present by recreating her past -and the possible pasts of her ancestors as well. Tam not only attempts to piece together her ancestor's lives through research and genealogy, she delves into lore so thoroughly she finds herself literally recreating the sea-legends that are intertwined with her own familial history. Mazza is able to juggle the various stories and mix them with imagined pasts and historical pasts, even using the occasional cutaway page of a blog or an electronic archive. Links between legend and historical fact--as well as Tam's personal past and her family's history--begin to accumulate pretty quickly, leaving the reader dazzled by Mazza's ability to keep all the plates spinning without wobble.

All this plus Waterbaby is a funny and compelling page-turner to boot.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Cris Mazza Gem, October 30, 2007

By 

C. Wycoff (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Waterbaby: A Novel (Paperback)

With its beautiful use of setting, its intricately interwoven storylines, and its unique treatment of themes like sibling rivalry and intimacy fears, Waterbaby is Cris Mazza's newest must-read novel.

In Waterbaby, Mazza also treats the reader to an unforgettable protagonist. Forty-nine year old Tam is an epileptic former swimmer who has never forgiven herself or her family for the limitations caused by her disease. She makes strange and extreme choices: cheating in a dog show, exiling herself to Maine, secretly harboring a teen mother and her baby, and obsessing over a ghost who is rumored to haunt an old lighthouse. Though the novel is, in part, a ghost story, Tam is the book's true ghost. A misfit who haunts her own life, she feels more comfortable pretending than she does living. But over the course of the novel, Tam learns that she is not as alone and disconnected as she once assumed. Experiencing this character's growth is richly rewarding for the reader, and by the end of the book, you'll want to cheer for the person Tam has become.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mazza Gives Readers Credit, October 16, 2007

By 

G.K. - See all my reviews

This review is from: Waterbaby: A Novel (Paperback)

Cris Mazza is one of the few writers of women-centered fiction today who gives readers an enormous amount of credit, not only for being able to follow parallel storylines in different time periods and modes (i.e. a family website, letters, flashbacks), but also for having the insight to decipher the emotionally complex landscape of her protagonists. Mazza is a master of the "psychological demons of the past come back to bear light on the future" tradition. Her characters, like many of fiction's best characters, tend to have something secret and traumatic in their pasts, but to Mazza's credit the "something" is very seldom predictable or cliche, rather it's usually something quite strange, in a refreshing and compelling way. Mazza's usual frank treatment of sexuality is also more enjoyably erotic here than in some of her (bleaker) books! Tam is an eccentric protagonist and a compassionate one, full of old grudges and fears, but also impulses to aid and love. Part "ghost" story, part historical novel, part family drama, and part on-the-lam adventure, Waterbaby showcases some of the fun formal "experimentalism" for which Mazza first became known within the context of a very accessible, satisfying story of redemption.