The Forms of Water - Softcover

Barrett, Andrea

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671795228 ISBN 13: 9780671795221

Publisher: Washington Square Press, 1994

Synopsis

At the age of eighty, Brendan Auberon--formerly of the Order of Our Lady of the Valley, now confined to a nursing home--has one last wish: to see his 200 acres overlooking what used to be Paradise Valley, before the villages were drowned to provide water for the city of Boston. Now, Brendan's memories drift beneath the surface of the Stillwater Reservoir. When Brendan dupes his nephew, Henry, into hijacking the nursing home van for the journey, what begins as a lark becomes an adventure infinitely more complex.

About this title

Review:

The Forms of Water is Andrea Barrett’s second highly accomplished novel and tells the story of the bitter history of the Auberon clan. Henry Auberon is a failed property developer, who has "lost his house, his daughters, his friends, his wife" and is now "trapped in a dead-end job with no future he could see." His sister Wiloma is an emotional wreck, absorbed in "the glories of her newfound religion" following an emotionally bruising divorce. The only connection to their lost childhood spent in Paradise Valley, long ago flooded to make way for a reservoir to quench the thirst of nearby Boston, is their 80-year-old Uncle Brendan. A former monk who has lost his faith, Brendan convinces Henry to take him on one final trip to see the Auberon’s remaining piece of land, which Henry will do anything to get his hands on and develop.

So begins a sometimes funny but relentlessly elegiac story of the search for a world that has been irretrievably lost. Henry, Brendan, Wiloma and their alienated children all converge on Paradise Valley, hoping to find something that will give their lives some meaning. The children pursue their parents "because they were confused and lost and destructive and incapable of caring for themselves. They were so busy chasing after a past they couldn’t recover that they couldn’t see what was happening right in front of their eyes." At the other extreme, Brendan wearily concludes that "it would take hours, days, for them to explain themselves to each other, and the telling would mean reliving everything. And who could stand that? Just surviving was work enough."

The Forms of Water is a beautifully written and carefully structured novel, but its bleak elegy to a lost world will not stimulate everyone as profoundly as Barrett’s triumphant first novel, The Voyage of the Narwhal.--Jerry Brotton

Review:

"Of all the writers in the present generation, I can think of no one who's better at exploring the crystalline structures of human relations than Andrea Barrett. The lady has a very powerful miscroscope. The Forms of Water is just lovely--deeply funny, deeply serious, wise."--Mark Childress, author of Georgia Bottoms

About this edition

• Publisher: Washington Square Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0671795228
• ISBN 13: 9780671795221
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304