Nathan Harris ‘The Sweetness of Water’ (2021)

 
[Note: With increasingly baroque recursion, I note that this is the ninth of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have read. My blog of the last of those (Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle) began:

This is the eighth of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have now read. When I blogged my reactions to the last one I finished (Mary Lawson's Town Called Solace), I prefaced my blogpost with this paragraph:

This is the seventh of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have read. My thoughts on some of those are blogged here (specifically: Damon Galgut's The Promise, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This). My review of Bewilderment by Richard Powers is forthcoming in The Guardian, and with two of the titles I feel my critical objectivity is too compromised for disinterested reviewing: Nadifa Mohamed's The Fortune Men (since Nadifa is a colleague of mine at RHUL, and an excellent one at that) and Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (Francis is a friend; I read the book in draft, and am even thanked in the acknowledgements. Cool, eh?). That leaves six: A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam, Second Place by Rachel Cusk, The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris, An Island by Karen Jennings, China Room by Sunjeev Sahota and Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead.

Will I read more? The shortlist is announced this coming Tuesday. Realistically I'm unlikely to read those of the longlist that don't make that shortlist, if I haven't by then. Although I do have a copy of Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, and it’s not very long, so I might jot down some thoughts about that over the weekend.]

***

There’s an interesting debate to be had on the topic of debut novels, though I’m not sure where or even if that debate is happening (I daresay it is, somewhere, and I’m just ignorant). Has the cultural logic of debut fiction changed, do we think? Put it another way: do new writers have to, as it were, ‘grow up’ in public in a way they didn’t have to in previous literary-historical periods? One model, perhaps a common one nowadays, is: a promising writer publishes her/his first novel. There are things to like and admire about this book, although it also shows manifold signs of inexperience, awkwardness, technical flubs, oddnesses of pacing or characterisation, clumsiness of style and so on. But there is promise, and readers are forgiving enough for Promising Writer to put out another novel. This is less marred by the faults of the debut, though P.W. is still perfecting her/his craft. By Novel 3, or maybe Novel 4, s/he has really got into their groove.

Was it always like this? Or did a different model use to obtain whereby (for instance) a would-be novelist spent many years in the practice nets of the short story before daring a long-form fiction, or else one where s/he wrote a series of novels that remained unpublished before finally starting to get things right with a book they were happy to send off to publishers?

I daresay I’m being naif, but it seems to me a very contemporary sort of question. I read a lot of SF and Fantasy and ‘growing up in public’ definitely seems a publishing problem in those genres. Perhaps it is in literary fiction too.

At any rate, here is Nathan Harris’s The Sweetness of Water written by an individual who is, judging by his author photo, fifteen or thereabouts (‘Doogie Howser, M.F.A’). I mean, I’m old and ugly and Harris is young and good-looking, so chalk my comment here to sour grapes if you like. But still.

The front cover, as you can see above, comes with an endorsement by Richard Russo (author both of the 2001 novel Empire Falls and the 1998 Twilight movie screenplay, and therefore evidently an individual we should heed) according to whom Sweetness of Water is ‘better than any debut novel has a right to be’. This perhaps looks praising, although it might actually just represent disappointment with the contemporary state of the debut. I mean, what rights does a debut have anyway? Does a debut author have the ‘right’ to produce a Portrait of the Artist or an Adam Bede? Seems like a screwy way of putting it, even if Russo means to locate the rights of readers, in terms of what they can reasonably expect from a read. But perhaps that's the point. We are not within our rights to expect a masterpiece with a first novel.

Not that The Sweetness of Water is a bad novel. It’s not: it’s fine. It’s set in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War (a period that seems to occupy for US writers a position somewhat akin the endlessly renovelised Tudors in the UK—the 2017 Man Booker list included three such historical novels, including the eventual winner Lincoln in the Bardo). It tells the story of two brothers, recently freed slaves: talkative Prentiss and his silent brother Landry. We soon discover that Landry’s silence indexes his trauma: when, still a slave, he had been used as a literal whipping boy, scapegoatishly enduring punishments for others. Now the two young men have been freed, though they have neither money nor prospects. They camp in a wood, trying to snare rabbits to eat and here they encounter George Walker, a white man who lives nearby with his wife Isabel. 

George is wandering the woods because he has just that day learnt that his son, Caleb, was killed in the war. George and Isabel are contented enough in their marriage, though they are rather distant from one another. Rather than farm the land he inherited, George has been selling off parcels of it in the nearby town of Old Ox to get money. But now that Caleb is dead he decides not to sell any more of his patrimoney, and to cultivate peanuts instead. He hires Prentiss and Landy to help him, treating them with quiet respect. This inflames resentment and prejudice in the town, where there are plenty of demobbed and unemployed white soldiers looking for work. The story moves forward in a relatively unhurried manner—Caleb, it turns out, is not dead (in fact he deserted) and he returns home. George visits a prostitute called Clementine, but for conversational rather than carnal reasons, since he can’t really talk to his wife. Things bubble along, with slowly growing and nicely-turned tension, and for a while this all works pretty well. But then about halfway through Harris evidently decided he needed to light the blue touchpaper, plotwise, and the latter half of the novel is a glut of Western cliché: murder, arson, a racist sheriff, a corrupt judge, a jailbreak, pursuit by a galloping posse, etc, etc.

Harris’s prose is almost—but not quite—there. Having decided, bravely, to devote a good portion of his novel to the quotidian and ordinary, the understatednesses of life, Harris doesn’t trust himself not to bore his reader and so gussies-up and overclocks his descriptions. The first time George tries to hire Prentiss and Landry, they decline:

“Why can’t you take no for an answer, mister?” Prentiss said. He whirled back to face George. … The pain in George’s face, so immense it might split him two [sic], was momentary, and he managed to disguise it with a grin. [46]

Disappointment that these two strangers won’t come work for him, that pain: not a raging toothache or axe to the cheek. And Prentiss really has no business whirling, I feel. There's a lot of that in this book: ‘George wheeled away from his friend’ [120]; ‘the other boy whipped about’ [143]; ‘Caleb lunged out of bed’ [340] and the like. I can't say all this dervishism serves the novel well. It's Harris swinging, and missing, at intensity. I hate to say it. Perhaps I’ll just whisper it: less is more.

When Caleb comes home he notices that his parents have grown apart, or as Harris styles it: ‘it was then he noticed the vastness of the space between his parents’ [73]. Caleb fancies toothsome young August (though she is set to be married to somebody else), or as Harris prefers to puts it: ‘in the curling of his toes and the clenching of his teeth as waves of joy coursed through him, it was as if a bell beneath his ribcage had lain at rest … [and now] the pealing of that bell shook his entire being, great jolts of delight’ [144]. George likes coffee:

George had risen early and brewed a cup of coffee. The first sip alone was so gratifying that he might as well have been a dog loosed from a kennel and given over to the smell of a fresh cut lawn, such was the rush he felt. He let it sink into him and thought of nothing else. [161]

I mean, Less Is More is not inscribed on Mosaic tablets such that all writers must obey, but there's loads of this in Sweetness of Water and it drags, it drags. Harris is reaching for a vehemence of affect that this style does not deliver.

The wind was so violent it felt as though it might cut through flesh like a whip. It quieted for a spell before it kicked up one last time and took off in the direction of town. [313]

I’m sorry: I just don’t believe in this wind, as described. ‘Caleb’s teeth began to chatter, the frozen air cutting through the vacant part of him that had, just a moment ago, been overcome by anger—by the swelling need for retribution’ [342]. If you say so, pal.

He awoke to an orchestra of horse hooves [205]

Writers, especially new writers, genuinely do deserve praise for trying to avoid cliché, working towards vivid newness in their similes. But, again: I don’t think this one works. Woodwind hooves, brass hooves, violin hooves, cello hooves … with all that sounding LSOishly in our ears, here’s George about to leave his farm for the last time:

The sun had risen in full now, and the farm sparkled under its canopy of soft yellows, the barn no longer red but burnt orange, the fields burnished with gold. The effect would wear off as the day progressed, but it was a sight to behold when the morning light poured in. He would miss it dearly. [255]

That last sentence is, simply, a failure of tone. If the Thomas Kinkade kitsch of the previous description has not conveyed that George will miss his farm, that telling-not-showing thumb in the balance at the end is only going to index the prose's failure in that regard.

I’m being hard on this novel I know, and certainly harder than is charitable. I'm sure Harris will grow more in control of his instrument as he continues writing. And there are genuinely promising aspects to this novel: the main characters are sharply delineated and easy to imagine, the dialogue is often flavourful and effective, the treatment of racism—clearly a main thrust of this novel, and clearly an important and worthwhile topic for contemporary fiction—avoids the Scylla of hysterical melodrama and the Charybdis of bland pieties: Harris dramatizes the way people (sometimes even the same people) can be kindly and foul to the racial Other, and his town has a real, variegated, people-rubbing-along-with-people vibe. But in too many places the tone slips, or the plot jolts mode, or something marks the point where the author is overcompensating his inexperience, or not trusting his reader to be interested in the understated and ordinary. It’s a decent novel. It’s not a Man-Booker-worthy novel.