The Water Cure

so many books use the same guidelines to writing. This book gives you a refreshing, but dark and funny read with a twist. Very interesting.

Having read several other Percival Everett-brand products, I now think of two different "Percival Everett" author functions. One is willing to write fairly conventional novels ("realism," as those who would put air/scare quotes around the word would say), and another finds such forms inadequate systems for conveyance of reality. For me, it was the latter author-function guise--an authorial presence who is grimly playful, willfully indirect, frustratedly eloquent--who wrote this book. The author function that produced "The Water Cure" tries to produce "art," while the other one is willing to write (in some other Everett-brand novels) what usually passes for art among those dwindling few who still read books. The narrator here is a hack novelist who faces up to his own hackiness amidst the crazed despair brought about by the death of innocence, as figured in his young daughter, and by his own thirst for revenge. The grim, willful, and frustrated author function put into this hack novelist's mouth the following description of art: "I don't believe that art is supposed to stand there like an open door or gate. It's supposed to be a wall that has to be scaled or a minefield that has to be negotiated." You're likely to find the adventure of reading this novel rewarding if you bring along some awareness of Saussurean Semiotics, Barthesian authorial inspections, and Platonic epistemological queries, as well as some curiosity about what the "it" actually is when we say "It's raining outside." But even if you don't bring all of that, the struggle through this broken narrative could still be very rewarding, and the many references to archaic philosophical notions are much more than mere erudition. You should also be willing to endure a narrator who wonders openly and repeatedly what it means to write and read novels in a country that appears to be heading, thanks to those in control of our steering wheel, straight off a cliff. We Americans are finding our torturing-and-killing side harder to ignore. Perhaps soon, more of us will be able to understand how the devastating death of an innocent girl in this novel could be fairly said to represent the most recent rape and murder of American innocence. The Everett-brand author function here exposes both "fiction" and our current fictional reality as fantasies, but he also conveys a very convincing, palpable sense of something real. That real, living, breathing thing is an artistic consciousness, struggling to find an excuse for art in such dismayingly brutal times.