Book Review: "We Are Water" by Wally Lamb

Some years ago someone recommended that I read the writer Wally Lamb and that was strangely because I was carrying around a copy of The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry. I have no idea what these two writers have to do with each other but I remember the person saying that these two were two of the quintessential modern American writers. Though I thoroughly disagree, it would take me years to actually remember this encounter. I saw a big book by Wally Lamb on a library shelf and stood there wondering about when I'd heard someone talk about this author before. It would come to me a few days after I borrowed the book.

She's got three children, she's been married for almost thirty years before - and she is now preparing to get married to a different person. One who helped her with her art career. Anna wants to marry in her hometown of Three Rivers, Connecticut. Of course, as the wedding approaches, there are some things that Anna must come to terms with. Honestly, this is quite a standard way to open a story about someone getting maried and I wasn't too enamoured with it though I did continue. I have to say that though I thought the beginning of Anna's story with the narrative regarding the dress was quite clever, sometimes Lamb's prose seems a bit packed with prose. It almost stops it from being sentimental at times.

It's clear to the reader that Anna's art is autobiographical and is often drawn from pretty traumatic experiences. One of these main experiences is a flood that drowned her mother and her sister that continues to haunt her. The language of this trauma is pretty brilliant but I won't mention the feeling of the prose being overloaded again. There's a scene in the book where she talks about going to the laundromat and begins that cycle of regret and 'what ifs' - that was an almost perfectly written scene. She asks herself the questions about 'what if' her mother hadn't drowned and 'what if' her father wasn't a drunk. Perhaps she could have gone to college and studied to be a 'real artist'.

Then we have Orion, Anna's ex-husband (yes, that's really his name. It's something you honestly struggle to take seriously when you're reading such serious topics). His life is falling apart after one of his students kills themselves and he himself is being accused of sexual harrassment. His image to Anna and their children is marred by this. I mean it's a bit too much of a confessional for me, especially his own narrative. But this doesn't mean it isn't everyone's thing. I'm again not going to repeat my point of overpacked prose, I'm just going to leave it here.

Orion and Anna have three children: Andrew who is conservative, Ariane who is traumatised and Marissa who is quite liberal and hippie-esque in her values. One thing that was quite interesting about this book is that different chapters are dedicated to different people. Each chapter is about a different character who is viewing the same event from a different perspective. To be honest, I didn't think too much of Andrew as a character as it felt like his story didn't really make much sense. I'm not going to tell you exactly how but there's something about his conservative values that don't really add up when you look carefully about how he was treated by his father.

As the wedding draws closer, we get harder looks into the family that we didn't see before. These include the way in which Andrew has a stupid religious fervor which again, doesn't make much sense. Another one is the self-destruction of Marissa as not only the youngest child but also the one who is almost ignored. I mean she doesn't seem to be the one that is the happiest or the most stable, but then again that can be said about any of the three kids. I think about it like this - if there's something wrong with all three of them then there was some quite bad parenting going on there.

All in all, by the end of the book I was kind of sick with sentimentality. I found this book to skirt around the difficult issues more than it should. It doesn't really bury deep enough into the psychological sides of destruction and unpredictable family events. It's not that I didn't enjoy it, but there were definitely ways to not make it so saccharine. It wasn't dark enough for some of its topics.