Waterbaby

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.

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.