Surrealism and Existentialism in literature and art (fictional coastal Connecticut town, present-day; East Village, Manhattan twenty-years ago): “Contemporary art is a great catalyst for serious conversations,” said the co-founder of Washington, DC’s soon-to-open private museum of modern art, the Rubell Museum.
The obsession to create groundbreaking art underscored in The Hundred Waters does for literature what it does for art: act as a catalyst for opening provocative conversations on contemporary crises of the soul and the planet as we know it. Endangered animals, a feature.
Lauren Acampora’s second novel (her first, The Paper Wasp, also explores art and “twisted ambition”; also authored an award-winning short story collection, The Wonder Garden) seems meant to be read on two levels: as a mesmerizing, eerie story and a symbolic, existential one. Like modern art, open to interpretations.
Some elements are familiar, others weird. “Strange” is an adjective even the publisher uses in its dust jacket description. The prose is exceptionally hypnotic. Words are notably intentional, shaping characters and the plot’s ambivalence, ambiguity, edginess, mystique.
Louisa Rader was and still yearns to be an acclaimed avant-garde photographer. Formerly a fashion model who wanted to be seen as having substance. Superficiality, significance, and originality are themes. Now thirty-nine, she spent twenty-years living in the bohemian enclave of NYC’s East Village. She left before gaining attention in a new wave of Post-Modern photography. Acampora doesn’t tell us what photographic style Louisa has focused on but it’s in the realm of controversial and intimate, dropping clues. For instance, three highly controversial photographers whose work achieved notoriety are named:
- Hannah Wilke whose self-portraits are “innovative and provocative”
- Diana Arbus, another “radical photographer”
- Robert Mapplethorpe whose black-and-white imagery disturbed sexual boundaries. He’s quoted as saying: “I come from suburban America. It was a very safe environment and was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave.” Life in the suburbs, good and bad, underpins the novel’s tone, character development, plot, and messaging.
We meet Louisa having lived twelve years in a fictional, wealthy suburban town in coastal Connecticut that feels close to Manhattan but removed from an artist who made no effort to keep in touch with the artsy scene she was once part of. Fleeing from there, she married a man twenty-years older than her, Richard, and is the mother of a twelve-year-old girl, Sylvie. Richard is the reason she’s back in CT, where she grew up. He’s a sought-after contemporary architect with a conventional style of parenting. More so in his worrying, rightfully so, about his adolescent daughter who’s like her mother: moody and keeps to herself. It fits Louisa’s personality and artsy perspective that she prefers to give her daughter more freedom. A source of tension in the marriage, but not the only problem.
The family lives in a “glass house” Richard built. The glass, symbolic of cool, detached, is essentially how Richard comes across with Louisa and how she mothers Sylvie. There’s more to Louisa’s aloofness than not wanting to be a helicopter parent. At times, resentful of motherhood, as if parenting held her back all these years from experimenting with her artistic cravings. Richard’s too busy and self-occupied to notice. When “Louisa withdraws to the master bedroom,” the word withdraw is a perfect choice since she’s withdrawn from her family (and community) for a long time. If he’d paid more attention, might the story have a different ending?
A slew of other examples help us interpret a novel that straddles both beauty and darkness in an intentional, masterly way. Starting with the fractured, contemporary art design of the book’s cover. What does the imagery mean? The fragility of beauty? Note the pillowcase. Does it suggest the prose and story are dreamlike, surreal, emblematic?
At 240 pages, it would be a mistake to think this is a breezy read. Abstract, mysterious, shadowing like modern art’s role “as a stimulus that can provoke independent thoughts and even emotions.” With multiple themes on artistic ambition and its price; apocalyptic fears of climate change; and the invisible consequences of a life constrained by suburbia, The Hundred Waters reads as if it were hundreds of pages longer.
Louisa’s life is about to dramatically change as she’s finally been stirred to do something about her ennui, alienation. Taking on the role of director of the local arts center, she envisions increasing its visibility by exhibiting and nurturing bold artists, including transforming an empty barn into an artists’ residency program.
When a young stranger comes to live in the town, Gabriel, he’s the perfect storm for the shocking events that will upturn Louisa and Sylvie’s lives, as well as Richard’s and the community at large.
The intentionality of the prose sets the stage for the entire novel in the first two pages. A foreboding mood created between natural things of beauty compared to artificial, superficiality. The sinister overtones are so finely crafted I re-read them twice. Like an artist Acampora paints words, as though she contemplated the precise shade of color to affect our emotions. Doing so, she casts a spell on the reader, somewhat the way artist and environmental activist Gabriel does on Louisa and Sylvie. But he’s a stalker while the author seeks to grab our attention to take stock of what’s important in life while also considering the consequences.
The opening line introduces “trees in bright leaf, juvenile green.” Followed by a moneyed landscape – “tennis courts, swimming pools, guest houses” – interrupted by “acres of wilderness.” A few lines down, the picture is of “a montage of wrought iron gates, stone walls marbled with lichen, driveways that twist into a dream of trees.” Suddenly, in the same paragraph, we’re jolted outside of this insulated suburban world to: “Beyond is fire and blood.” To make sure we understand the novel has a lot to do with climate change the first paragraph ends with:
“The West has begun its long burn while rains soak the plains. The Mississippi surges. A climate group blocks traffic with a boat, pours blood on the streets of London. In Paris, a great cathedral stands charred.”
At the bottom of page one, another switch. To “a boy.” Page two tells us he’s “a man of eighteen, a free agent.” Meaning what? On this page, the boy (Gabriel) appears as an uncomfortable voyageur of “a girl” (Sylvie) he’s surreptitiously photographing while she’s “lost in a book” at a swimming pool. He feels creepy; she friendless, part of her state of mind.
Like Sylvie, Gabriel is an only child of a newly arrived couple from “Austria, old nobility” for whom Richard has designed a house for. When Louisa, anxious to get out of the house more than anything else, decides to attend their housewarming party her smile is “abstract.” Another great word to describe someone who makes a “snap decision” that the house “lacks charm and character,” barely engages with guests, avoids one family she shouldn’t, yet later tells Richard she had a “satisfying” time. Satisfying in what sense? Art?
The house is “heavily decked” with a range of art spanning the “Renaissance to modern art,” but there’s “nothing transgressive” like Lucien Freud’s nudes; or Neo Rauch’s surrealistic paintings; or Gerard Richter’s abstract visual works. All cited.
The Hundred Waters achieves what it set out to do. We may not like how the characters have set themselves up for what happens, but they do shake us up. Telling us not to lull ourselves into a false sense of security. To reflect on how we live our lives. Pay closer attention to the things that really matter – personally and more worldly.
Lorraine