A tease of the first order
Anita Brookner
THE WEIGHT OF WATER by Anita Shreve Little, Brown, f15.99, pp. 246 During the night of 5 March 1873 two women, Norwegian immigrants, were murdered on the curiously named Smuttynose Island, one of several rocky outcrops 10 miles off the coast of New Hampshire. A third woman survived, and in 1899, suffering from an acute burden of unmanageable feelings, wrote a memoir which the author of this excellent novel has concocted for her unlikely heroine, and which the narrator's modern-day avatar abstracts from the Portsmouth public library archives. Already we are plunged into a mixture of fact and fantasy: the Norwegian survivor, Maren, is, or rather was, real, as are the transcripts of her trial, but her memoir, written in the archaic language of the rudimentarily though carefully educated, is fantasy, or rather an invention. The narrator, Jean, a photo- journalist, comes into the story because she shares a boat trip to Smuttynose with her husband, her husband's brother and his girlfriend, and her small daughter: her assignment is to provide a background for a magazine article on the murders.
It is Jean who purloins the papers from the Portsmouth Atheneum and who pro- vides as much of the disclosure as we are allowed. Clearly we are in familiar territo- ry: the illiterate 19th-century victim, over whose motives a question-mark remains, and the present-day narrator who resur- rects the story — parallel narratives, in fact, of which the most recent example is Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace. There is an odd excitement about this sort of novel, in which feminist sympathies, in search of a victim, are waylaid by rather more troubled considerations, and in which an air of blamelessness implodes into matters of far greater complexity. Anita Shreve is to be congratulated on handling this almost for- mulaic structure so seamlessly. After a slight initial awkwardness her story becomes enthralling: this novel, along with the Atwood, will no doubt be taught at creative writing courses in years to come, as an object-lesson in how to unravel a complicated plot.
What are we to make of Jean, the con- temporary narrator, our hypocrite lectrice and therefore presumably our soeur? Her life is confused, in the approved contempo- rary manner: she is married to a drunken poet, is attracted to his brother, hates the brother-in-law's girlfriend whom she is quite capable of tipping over the side of the boat in which they are sailing. An extreme- ly frightening storm at sea makes this 'acci- dent' all the more plausible. Her muddled thinking is in sharp contrast to the simple account to be resurrected from the Portsmouth archives.
Maren Hontvedt was an obedient girl from Laurvig in Norway who was betrothed and married to a man she hardly knew. She accompanied him on the terrible journey to America and stoically took up residence in a small red house on Smuttynose Island. This much she tells us, together with details of the hard work of cooking and spinning and cleaning that was to be her lot. What she almost tells us is rather more mysteri- ous. Her early years were idyllic, although it is difficult to see why: her father was away at sea, her mother was ill, and she cordially hated her elder sister. The only member of the family she loved was her brother Evan, who comes with an aura of heroism to which the otherwise sober Maren pays tribute.
This inclination survives her marriage to John and even the advances of their lodger, Louis Wagner, but is activated by the arrival first of her hated sister Karen and latterly by Evan himself, with his new bride, Anethe. It is not easy to say whose pres- ence proves to be the more burdensome. The verdict pronounced by the Portsmouth coroner, after the bodies of Karen and Anethe were found clubbed to death, was summary, as were the doctors' reports. One will now ask, as one is meant to, how Maren escaped, and how she survived. Not a shred of guilt attached to her name. The murders were attributed to the lodger, Louis Wagner, whom John Hontvedt, at the instigation of his wife, had ordered to leave, and he was duly hanged.
Canny feminists, who already know that mixed motives are a useful currency, will nevertheless applaud Maren, whether or not they believe in her. She is theirs, whether they like it or not. They will be on her side on account of her stoical terrible life: married off and thereby finished off. They will, despite all their subtleties, be beguiled against their wills by Maren's account of her activities, her diet of bread, fish and the occasional cake, her one dress and pair of socks, her attempts to brighten her home with curtains and a quilt. Her acquiescence will touch an almost unwilling chord. They will lose sight of Jean on the boat with her ill-matched crew; they may grow tired of her introspections, which are, however, largely justified. They may even, at the moment of reading, wonder whether it is safe to exhume another obscure 19th-century heroine, however great the attendant sympathy.
This is a subversive narrative, as it is meant to be. Quite rightly we are spared the author's own reflections; indeed the author is notably absent, leaving poor glum Jean to do the work, or rather not do it. Readers may glimpse the ending, and will almost certainly get it wrong, or rather will not get it exactly right. The Weight of Water is a novel of the pioneer or North Ameri- can school. Plainly told, it is a tease of the first order.
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