Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/456364
Love by Drowning Novel by C.E. Poverman I am not lying when I say this book is bet- ter than "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn. Poverman gives us a situation and set of char- acters as mysterious and intriguing as Flynn does in "Gone Girl." He surprises us just as much, and we are as riveted to the author's slow unraveling of the main players' psy- chologies. We keep reading "Love by Drowning" because ultimately we must know about Davis and Lee Anne. We are as defenseless against their allure as is Val, and we will read on until we've been given the scenes with which to make sense of their tan- gled and dangerous triangle. But a difference between this book and Flynn's is Poverman invents characters we actually care about. The man and woman whose points-of-view we alternate between in Flynn's book are both unlikeable. I get it that this was the author's intention; I get it that the book is a bestseller. But for me, Flynn's portrayal of them as one-sided, as essentially evil, is a flaw and a weakness. What Poverman has done is both more skillful and more realistic: he's painted three-dimensional characters who are as likely to do right as they are to do wrong, characters whose obsessions and actions blur the line between good and evil, whose backgrounds and circumstances justify the havoc they wreak. Among many gorgeous passages, here's a description of Davis, as a high school football player : "…he would be all over the field, blitzing the quarterback, breaking up passes and making interceptions or tackles with unbelievable force, with the precipitous, explosive clatter of a car crash…blue eyes burning with a trance-like bril- liance above the blacking of his cheekbones." "Love by Drowning" has within it many glori- ous parallels: two generations of fathers and sons disappointing each other ; the son of Val, who is growing up to be a replica of Val's broth- er Davis (both a good and a bad thing); things that collect at the bottom of the ocean—a man, a boat; things tangled up in lines—a brother, a marlin, a corpse; the broken glass all over two murder scenes, decades apart; Lee Anne—a woman who keeps herself sharp by doing crossword puzzles, who is herself a puzzle, whose cryptic postcards to Val, over a 16- year period, are a riddle to be assembled, deciphered and solved; Lee Anne's former self, seemingly as easy to abandon as a winter coat in a Miami Greyhound station; stolen boats and babies—dock lines and umbilical cords severed. However flawed these characters, how- ever misguided, you will sympathize with them. This novel's complications and layers demonstrate that there are multiple ways to "drown." Rare Bird Memoir by Anna Whiston-Donaldson I consumed this book over a two-day period, damn near canceling plans so that my reading of it would continue without interrup- tion. Anna Whiston-Donaldson offers up this memoir, equally exquisite and heart-wrenching, as a tribute to 12-year-old Jack, the son she lost in a flood on Sept. 8, 2011. I found the author first through this post on her blog, www.anin- chofgray.blogspot.com, titled "The Bridge: One Terrible Night": "…this was the broken woman who had told her kids to go ahead and play in the rain. Who had warned her kids about light- ning and salmonella and sexual abuse and pornography and STDs and bullying and col- lapsing tunnels of sand and snow, but who had never given the creek one single thought." 104 C A R M E L M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 1 5 IN REVIEW B Y M E L A N I E B I S H O P Passionate Words of Personal Loss and Deep Love