The Watery Part of the World [Hardcover]

Michael Parker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 26, 2011

Michael Parker’s vast and involving novel about pirates and slaves, treason and treasures, madness and devotion, takes place on a tiny island battered by storms and cut off from the world. Inspired by two little-known moments in history, it begins in 1813, when Theodosia Burr, en route to New York by ship to meet her father, Aaron Burr, disappears off the coast of North Carolina. It ends a hundred and fifty years later, when the last three inhabitants of a remote island—two elderly white women and the black man who takes care of them—are forced to leave their beloved spot of land. Parker tells an enduring story about what we’ll sacrifice for love, and what we won’t.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Parker's affecting fifth novel mines two historical anecdotes from 1813 and 1970 to draw parallel narratives around island dwellers off the North Carolina coast. When a vessel carrying Theodosia, daughter of Vice President Aaron Burr, is attacked by pirates, she's left for dead on Nag's Head island. A parchment-thin hermit nurses her back to health and protects her as she embarks on a new life with a freed slave while still lamenting the loss of her possessions and her past. And in 1970, Woodrow, a black man, and Maggie and Whaley, two white sisters, are the last remaining residents of the same North Carolina island. Woodrow knows the myths that mainlanders have created around the trio's isolation: "They wanted to turn it into... something about how lost the three of them were across the water, all cut off from the rest of the world and turned peculiar because of it." Both sets of island people forge indelible allegiances to each other, linked as they are by blood and water. Parker's (Don't Make Me Stop Now) complex world is stocked with compelling characters brought to life by elegant prose. (Apr.)
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Review

i"Parker invokes magic as well as mystery in exploring the ways the past not only haunts the present but in some ways anticipates it. Like Faulkner and O'Connor, Parker creates a place of beauty and complexity which, in the end, one is reluctant to leave...A vividly imagined historical tale of isolated lives."  --Kirkus Reviews
(Kirkus Reviews)

“This is a highly readable study of fear, compulsion, and what it means to be trapped. The writing is smoky and beautiful; the lonely island setting is the most compelling character in the story. Against this backdrop, Parker delves into the human heart and distills for his readers the truths found there.”—Library Journal

(Library Journal)

“In a lush feat of historical speculation, Michael Parker imagines that Theo survived a pirate attack off the coast of North Carolina and lived out a long, conflicted life on one of the barrier islands. The Watery Part of the World — that evocative title comes from ­Moby-Dick — is an emotionally acute tale about a brilliant woman of privilege who must suddenly use her wits to avoid dismemberment, rape and starvation… … [Parker] lays out a bewitching triangle of dependent relationships in this inclement Gothic tale.” --Washington Post
(Washington Post)

"Parker's complex world is stocked with compelling characters brought to life by elegant prose." --Publishers Weekly

(Publishers Weekly)

“A remarkable story… The entire novel has a blue-green, underwater feel, a timeless forgetfulness.”—Los Angeles Times
(Los Angeles Times)

“Parker slices open each isolated life with humor and gentleness, and the familiar battles with loss and loneliness he chronicles makes even this remotest of locations feel close to home.”—People
(People Magazine)

“Parker slices open each isolated life with humor and gentleness, and the familiar battles with loss and loneliness he chronicles make even this remotest of locations feel close to home.”
—People, 4-star review

“I found The Watery Part of the World all but impossible to put down . . . This elegantly written tale reflects on the nature of race, love, regret, dependence, fear, sorrow, honor and envy—the eternal challenges of being human. The characters, even the minor ones, are fully formed, the setting is so vividly described that you feel you know it intimately, and Parker’s writing is purely wonderful.” —Nancy Pearl, NPR.org


“A lush feat of historical speculation . . . Disparate parts—pirates and aristocrats in one century; elderly ladies and their handyman in another . . . But Parker has managed to stir them together in a vivid tale about the tenacity of habit and the odd relationships that form in very small, difficult places.”
—The Washington Post




“A remarkable story . . . The entire novel has a blue-green, underwater feel, a timeless forgetfulness.”
—Los Angeles Times

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; Complete Numbers Starting with 1, 1st Ed edition (April 26, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565126823
• ISBN-13: 978-1565126824
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #468,717 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

MICHAEL PARKER is the author of five novels - Hello Down There, Towns Without Rivers, Virginia Lovers, If You Want Me To Stay, The Watery Part of the World and two collections of stories, The Geographical Cure and Don't Make Me Stop Now. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various journals including Five Points, the Georgia Review, The Idaho Review, the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, Oxford American, Shenandoah, The Black Warrior Review, Trail Runner and Runner's World. He has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. His work has been anthologized in the Pushcart, New Stories from the South and O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia, he is a Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Visit his website at www.michaelfparker.com

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Immersion May 12, 2011

By j snow

Format:Hardcover

Never turn your back on the sea: an old adage about the unpredictability, mutability, and overwhelming suddenness of the ocean. Invariably, there will be tourists who don't take heed. One could say the same about the heart. The sea and love make and unmake you; they are at once necessary and have the power, as Michael Parker puts it, to "get away with you." Parker has written a beautiful, elegant novel about islanders who experience the vicissitudes and blessings of hard-earned belonging, and who withstand - sometimes admirably, sometimes not -- the losses to which we are born.

The narrative of Theodosia Burr Alston and Whaley is especially absorbing. Her survival on the island depends on the surrender of nothing less than her seemingly indelible identity; her endurance is possible because of an unadorned love that no one, especially not she, could have imagined would wash ashore. Theodosia's life is a remarkable trajectory and Parker tells her story deftly and, thankfully, without sentimentality. We need stories of (physical and emotional) survival told with honesty and compassion like this. They are the literary coordinates for our own emotional lives and too often we are insulted with the abundance of tales that offer us romance and all its overdetermined scaffolding when we'd rather have the starkness of genuine love, trust and need.

There are some minor missteps - or rather, near missteps. The historical figure of Virginia Dare, which Maggie and Miss Whaley -- both lonely children in their respective ways -- use for imaginative inspiration, seems a bit smuggled in. The potentially larger problem is Parker's delineation of Woodrow as all-knowing and mostly flawless Black waterman; the worry early on was that the author would elevate him to the level and type of mythic Black man, at one with nature. But Parker humanizes him in a way that will break your heart (here the reader is reminded of Gloria Naylor's Mama Day). Indeed, it is during Woodrow's storyline when the narrative swells, opening up unknown space - at this point the reader knows she is in good hands.

Although one supposes that Parker has read Faulkner (a remark about a coffin seems to quote As I Lay Dying), The Watery Part of the World is most strongly reminiscent of Morrison, both syntactically and in the etching of a character's thought process -- especially Theodosia, who reminds this reader of the unforgettable Sethe of Beloved. Indeed, the author is a natural inheritor of the American literary tradition, which is unflinchingly resigned to the wilderness but recognizes its sublime beauty: a nature forever redeeming the losses it exacts by provoking gratitude, mercy and awe. Like his characters, Parker is immersed in and enthralled to his island, which gives this novel its power.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Impressive Book May 16, 2011

By just a reader

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

First, let me say, that I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The prose was beautifully written, smooth as butter and a joy to read. Parker obviously knows what he's doing here. And the intertwining stories were equally engaging. I'm not always a fan of parallel storylines, but in this case they were expertly done, and it felt like the right way to tell these stories. I would recommend this book to anyone, as it was not only emotionally engaging on a plot level, but also a work of art on a sentence by sentence level.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite book of the past eight years May 27, 2011

By Dr. Pepper

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

To me, The Watery Part of the World is the perfect book. I could go on and on with praise for Parker's well-drawn characters and the way that setting serves as one, too; the lyricism and pacing of his lines to conjure the torrent of the rain and winds, of human emotions, the flatness of them, too; and the depths to which the story mines the contrariness and secrets of the heart and mind, but I'll stop here because you best read the book and see what I mean.

But I must go on to say that this is my favorite novel since the 2003 publication of The Known World by Edward P. Jones, and I believe that Parker, like Jones, is one of best writers in this country.