The Forms of Water Book

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 BrottonRead More