Customer Reviews

Waterbaby: A Novel

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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.

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.

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.

This meta-mythic novel is set in the material world of our diseased, touch-starved bodies, our light-housed landscapes dotted by wastebaskets echoing the wail of abandoned babies. It is also set in the event horizon of its own unfolding creation, the subjective laws of which are continually laid bare before us. Finally, though, I suspect the book will be mostly enjoyed for this: here's a good old fashioned ghost story with a ghost story's conflicted heart that sounds both of loss and reclamation. Waterbaby is a fascinating contribution to Mazza's impressive oeuvre.

The greatest pleasure of "Waterbaby" is the sense of being in the hands of a master storyteller. The voice alone, deceptively simple and straightforward, intrigued this reader to relax and let it take me. This is a rare quality, quite independent of compelling character or driving plot. Yet "Waterbaby" provides characters and plot aplenty. It has been called a ghost story, which it is, even an erotic ghost story; but of a surprising post-9/11 kind. (One character, a search-and-rescue professional, is more than haunted by what he and his search-dog find in the still-burning ruins of the World Trade Center.) In Shakespeare, ghosts are the past penetrating the present. In Mazza the present invades, recreates the past, in every sense. One ghost, Tam, the main character herself, a relatively young (late 40's) retired stockbroker, takes imaginative and spiritual possession of an unremembered, long-dead ancestor who once helped keep a light-house on the dark and stormy coast of Maine. Family is the mysterious presence disturbing Tam - not only the hostile "hero" brother who disappears to pursue her, but all the alien great-great aunts and uncles, grandfathers and grandmothers who never knew her but now will not leave her in peace. Central to her exploration of who they were and how they persist in her are a shipwrecked baby, a newborn found in a toilet, and a drowned woman whom the locals continue to see walking at twilight the light-house rocks. Not the least ghostly of the people leading Tam into her terra incognita is the graveyard lover who insists she play the drowned woman - for prospective renters of the modernized light-house. No one writes with more comic poignance about the guerilla warfare of intimacy between women and men than the author of "Your Name Here_____" and "Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?" But I have long hoped she would enlarge her canvas and here she does: reaching out to the loves and wars of siblings, children, and parents - Maine to California - and 21st century back to 20th and 19th, with assurance, depth, compassion, and inexhaustible, penetrating wonder.

Cris Mazza is so skilled at using the various voices
we use in modern life: email, letters, websites and
news are all a part of this haunting story and each
one not only expresses each character but almost
becomes a character itself, so that there is
Tam--forthright, searching, sensitive and skilled at
self protection and diplomacy--and then there is Tam
the email writer who is rageful, irate, searing and
pained. She gracefully weaves Tam's personal history
with loss, epilepsy and water with a search that goes
beyond her own parameter. Babies: dead, alive, unborn,
within each character, and those that exist only as
thoughts of what could have been populate this novel
throughout. They serve a largely symbolic role
underscoring the infant-like need and desire we all
feel for love as this thoughtful middle age woman
looks back on her life so far. In addition to being a
story about Tam's life, it is also a book full of
suspense and mystery where sexuality, identity, and
relationships magically propel the narrative.

"Waterbaby" is somewhat of a departure for Cris Mazza. While she generally sets her stories in Southern California, or at least populates them with people from that region, this novel takes place in a Maine coastal town. The other side of the country though has some similarities to the hardscrabble desert; the landscape becomes a character as much as any person in this novel. The continuity of the rocky shore and lobster industry across generations makes up a large part of the main character Tam's dilemma. As she tries to find her place in her own family, the various family dynamics of past generations intrudes on her psyche as well. The story then incorporates several lost baby stories as Tam investigates her ancestors and her relationships with her family, especially her brother. As in several of Mazza's works, the theme of regret and the conflict that arises from trying to negotiate being a woman play a large role in the novel. Additionally, like other American writers (i.e. Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, Faulkner), Mazza merges style and place in a masterful way. Family relationships, sex, and self-reliance might be as dangerous as the rocky shore of Maine. Mazza does a wonderful job of portraying these dangers with honesty and engaging storytelling.

Cris Mazza has for many years now been on the radar of readers who admire technical skill and innovation. Her latest, Waterbaby, demonstrates the same technical mastery of her earlier writings, but adds an imaginative dimension to result in her most satisfying effort to date. She begins, not unusually, with a character flawed in body as well as spirit. Tam suffers from epilepsy and has been tormented since childhood by the memory and consequences of a seizure during a swim-meet. She would have drowned had her athletic brother Gary not saved her--or possibly he selfishly used her to appear the hero, in the process dahsing Tam's own girlhood dreams of athletic excellence. Tam has been haunted by this early memory and its consequences for the long forty-something years before the novel begins. Through another series of mishaps (also perhaps resulting from personal failings) she ends up in the rich setting of a Maine lighthouse, haunted by her memories, by a hard-luck single mom and kid she chooses to harbor, by a distant ancestor she researches, and, finally, by an actual ghost. Mazza pieces the various stories together in a pastiche of different verbal media (including letters, emails, websites, and traditional past tense narrative). So much for the technical mastery, which is accomplished and assured as usual. The great achievement of Waterbaby is the investment the reader comes to feel in Tam, in wanting her to accept/transcend her past and become a more whole person. The magnetism of this main character keeps the many different quirky minor characters, asides, episodes, from eroding reader interest.

What a deliciously conceived novel about personal redemption! The protagonist, Tam, suffers her first epileptic seizure at 12. Her condition will steal her swimming career and estrange her from her brother, Gary. But it will not impede her journey into her troubled family's complicated past, a journey that takes her to the Maine coastline, going back to the early nineteeth century. Here tales of thwarted love and shipwrecked babies haunt the landscape. Tam will unlock more than one story, connecting newspaper acounts, oral history and her own search for understanding until she unfolds a broad historical panorama, a fascinating past. Particularly terrific is Mazza's interweaving of contemporary tools of communication, from websites, to blogs, to email mixed with archival accounts. Reading Waterbaby is a thrilling intertextual adventure that feels immediately ours, but simultaneously layered with a fresh understanding of nineteenth century economic and legal conditions for women and their children. As always, Mazza, is a wise voice, deeply concerned. This novel is a thrilling non stop read.

Waterbaby is a haunting story of missed connections, miscommunication and the way life might have been if we were braver, or better, or less self-regarding, or, maybe mostly, luckier.
And Mazza takes her lucky readers to one of the most out-of-the-way places of all, a part of the Maine coast that still has the feel of a wild frontier in the off-season. During and after reading this tale of the place where water meets land, you will feel, refreshingly, as if the sea spray has washed over you, and as if you've been into the mystery of a nineteenth century graveyard.
Tam, the protagonist, is someone who's lost everything she ever loved but never surrenders. She struggles to give the lie to Fitzgerald's famous phrase that "There are no second acts in American lives." Her struggle and journey are riveting, engrossing.
Somehow, Mazza has managed to combine intense, suspenseful readability with complex multilayering. Besides being gripping, Waterbaby is a handbook of embodied techniques for modern fiction writers; and a plea for the personal in an age of mass tragedies and mass culture.