WATERBORNE
By
Bruce Murkoff
Alfred A. Knopf
393 pages
$25.00
At a recent holiday party I was cornered by a boor who told me
that he loathed historical fiction, and insisted that I explain
to him why I write such stuff. Why, he wanted to know, didn’t
I “just write history?”
A
couple drinks into the evening, I was most eager to seek out old
friends and impress young women, but he had piqued me into trying
to defend myself. I tried my usual lines, about how the past always
informs the present, and how after all War and Peace was
historical fiction, and so was The Iliad, and the ancient
Greeks didn’t call it “historical” at all but
regarded it as one of the foundation myths of their society, a
living, meaningful story, and why shouldn’t we be just as
involved with our history, on all levels, as myth and
fiction as well as “straight” nonfiction?
The
boor wasn’t buying it, though, and I had to palm him off
on a much larger, more aggressive writer, who soon had him pinned
to a wall, lecturing him on the difference between art and pop
art. Well, such is the price of free gin. But the question continued
to nag at me, since I’ve often been asked things by various
interviewers. Why not just write history, indeed?
A
much better rebuttal than I could provide is offered by Bruce
Murkoff, in his debut novel, Waterborne. It is a story
about one of the great engineering achievements of American history,
the construction of the Hoover Dam, and if this does not convince
you that historical fiction is worth the candle maybe you should
just read history, or better yet, give up reading altogether,
for it is lost on you. Waterborne is a formidable achievement
in its own right, an engrossing story, masterfully told—and
the dam is only a small part of it.
To
use Murkoff’s own, controlling metaphor of a river, his
story is simple enough on the surface. It traces the lives of
three characters, all recently traumatized to one degree or another,
as they converge on the dam’s construction site during the
traumatic year of 1932.
Filius Poe is a brilliant, somewhat aloof engineer from Wisconsin,
a man of considerable accomplishment who has recently been sundered
from his beloved wife and child by a calamitous boating accident.
Lena McCardell is a good-hearted housewife from Oklahoma—and
content to remain just that—when she discovers that her
Bible-salesman husband has a second wife and family on the road,
and she takes their young son and goes to live with her best friend,
who is running a café in the dam boomtown of Boulder, Nevada.
Lew Beck is a brutally tough construction worker, the son of a
butcher in Los Angeles who has had to fight his way through life
due to his diminutive height, and who is well advanced on the
long devolution from nice Jewish boy to sexual psychopath.
What
keeps one reading, as these three lives flow toward a somewhat
predictable collision at the dam, is how thoroughly Murkoff has
imagined their worlds. Even the most passing characters are superbly
rendered, and alive. Every stretch of roadside landscape, every
conversation and urgent thought feels as though the author has
experienced it personally.
Waterborne
is filled with the knowledge, and the craft of things, everything
from sailing a boat to ice fishing; from selling Biblical tracts
to collecting a gambling debt; from touring Paris in the twenties
to…building a dam. This is the sort of writing that is a
pleasure to read even when the technical details are lost on a
layman. For my money, Murkoff’s prose is even more lyrical
and evocative than Charles Frazier’s tour de force
in Cold Mountain, and his subjects are infinitely more
diverse. Young lovers in Paris watch as “the sun rose and
light shimmered down the narrow street like something presented
to them on the blade of a knife,” while a boy playing baseball
fields groundballs that “reminded him of matinee cartoons,
of rabbits pinging across the desert and cannonballs gone amok.”
On
nearly any given page one can find such looping, daring, elegant
sentences as this one on Lena McCardell’s departure from
Oklahoma: “It was four in the morning when she woke the
boy, his body salty sweet, his skin still spicy from the wild
sage he’d run through behind the smokehouse on his way to
the muddy pond where he spend the day chasing frogs around the
crumbled edges of stinky muck and cattails.” Or Murkoff’s
description of something so mundane as the hundreds of dump trucks
necessary to service the dam: “The fleet, already suffering
after two years of abuse, was allowed to stop for gas and belt
changes, but otherwise kept running, their engines cooked and
bearings shot, the brakes worn down to metal sighs, the roofs
fortified with dented sheets of scavenged tin, the doors hacked
off so drivers could ride with one foot on the runner, windshields
busted out early for fear of broken glass.”
There
are some, slight flaws in characterization. Filius and Lena, and
all the other good guys, are perhaps a little too good to be true.
Lew Beck has perhaps a few too many chances to display his terrifying
temper. One wonders just why this sort of predator has become
so prevalent in American fiction and film today. I’ve used
him more than once myself, this raging man. He seems to pop up
almost automatically, no doubt a totem of the violence that lies
buried closer to the national heart than we would otherwise like
to believe.
In
Waterborne, he appears to represent both how one’s
own life can take a terrible wrong turn, and the chance of unforseeable,
violent accident in the lives of others, like a submerged rock
or a river sandbar. But like all the best writers, Murkoff does
not let any of his characters stand as simple metaphor. Lew Beck
is, instead, a brilliantly realized individual, one whom the reader
even feels some sympathy for, and his tormented presence keeps
one riveted to the page.
Then
there is the history, which is largely oblique here. Murkoff duly
acknowledges the Depression, but nowhere does it seem like the
yowling terror it had become in America by 1932. A lame-duck Herbert
Hoover makes a brief cameo at the dam that would be named for
him, and a woman spits in the wake of his car—but after
all, as one character points out, at the time Boulder was the
only town in America where everyone was employed. One would also
like to know a little more about the greater purpose of the dam,
of how it would change the land and a whole way of life in the
West—but it also seems likely that the men who built it
would indeed have been focused almost wholly on the awesome work
at hand.
None
of these caveats detract significantly from the work. Murkoff,
who is over 50, has made an astonishing beginning, and can have
a brilliant career if he wants it. One can’t help but wonder
where he has been all these years; his author bio reveals only
that he “spent many years in California,” and now
resides in upstate New York with his wife. No matter; it’s
easy enough to imagine one taking a lifetime just to think out
such a seamless and intricate work.
And
he has provided us with that answer to why we read and write historical
fiction. It is because, with all the wondrous things we do today,
we no longer build thousand-foot dams that tame great and ancient
rivers. It is because our curiosity cannot be limited to the shimmering
surface of fact, but longs to get at the deeper currents, the
lives that people lead, today or yesterday or whenever. It is
because there can be no limitations, of time or place or imagination,
on telling a damned good story.
Kevin
Baker is the author of the historical novels Dreamland and Paradise
Alley.
©
Copyright The Washington Post Company
