Review: The Waters

The Waters is a novel in 21 stories, following the eponymous Waters family through 40 years. Beginning in the present day and moving backwards, the family’s climactic and formative moments are revealed in pieces. Immersive, incisive and beautiful, the novel is a gradually unfolding tale of shifting sympathies and nuance, involving you intimately in the family’s fate.

Pat, the patriarch, sold up the Banks Peninsula family farm in 1979 after promising his dying father he wouldn’t. Was it this broken promise that cursed the Waters to their various future misfortunes? It certainly causes immediate misery in a move to a filthy house, the compounding of his wife’s serious depression and the eventual loss of his inheritance through reckless investment in empty sections that never become homes. 

Pat is introduced to us as a monstrous figure through his oldest son’s memories, a drunken brute chasing the kids through the pine forest at night.  The boys, Mark and Davey, cutting their teeth on violence, fear and failure.  Sam, the baby daughter, is insulated from the worst by being too young to remember it by the time they’re all sent to foster care.  Her good luck allows her a more peaceful life than the boys as they grow up but generational trauma waits in the wings for her children.

Davey, the younger brother is beautiful and passive. Things happen to Davey, and he lets them happen; always noticed and singled out due to his attractiveness even as a child, he never needs to act for life to unfold. This has the inevitable effect on his character in wasted potential and recklessness.  

The oldest, Mark, is urgent and intense and the character who will most tightly grip your heart. One of the most striking stories in the novel is Bullrush, a set piece of gladiatorial childhood.  It’s a treatise on young male social structure, the negotiable lines between physical dominance and bullying, Lord of the Flies in a lunchtime. While it’s a stand-alone essay of New Zealand boyhood and the brutality of the playground, filled with bare feet and dust and skinned knees, it’s also the apotheosis of Mark’s character.

In Bullrush we see him at his best, the bloodied, stoic god of the school field.   But Mark is both adamantine and shattered. He is the boy that will eventually become Mark Waters of Bullrush Investments in the earlier story As Is, Where Is, succeeding where his father failed in property development but still a broken child fighting a losing battle with his memories of pain.

Nixon has a gorgeous, enveloping eye for sensory detail that pulls the reader into the scene. Steam filling the night air above an almost-deserted hot pool in Hanmer Springs, drinking water from a plastic Coke bottle on a stifling summer afternoon, dead blowflies prickly on the windowsill, autumn leaves dry and loud on the tree. Its deeply immersive, evoking the nostalgic melancholy mood of the novel.

There’s also wry humour. Sam’s husband Scribbler’s dancing ‘was like a stick insect walking over oiled glass in a strong wind.’  Jade, the professional psychic daughter of Pat’s girlfriend is both ridiculous and sublime, calling herself Madame Mystique and keeping a turban in stock for older clients who like that sort of thing, but embodying genuine compassionate insight and possibly genuine occult powers.  Nixon leaves us to hope that her psychic interventions are healing for the Waters family, that one of Pat’s last acts has been something to help where he has otherwise only hurt but we will never know.

The Waters is a saga of family trauma, the pain that close relationships can inflict and the confusion that results when those complex relationships with flawed people also include care and love, the baked beans and bedtimes of everyday life.  Heartbreaking and unresolvable, dull agonies of regret and inadequacies of atonement, permanently tied and inescapable: this is what families are.

Reviewed by Ruth Spencer