We Live in Water

            First off, I must mention that for the last three years I have been writing in a journal a review of all the books I read.  I only count that books that I read from start to finish and I also include unabridged audio-books.  I have found that by making these entries I recall the tales better and it makes me examine my re-action to the story.   Secondly, you should know that I started a book club, the Short Stories Book Club, back in 2005 and we still meet on the last Thursday of the month.  For our July meeting we read We Live in Water by Jess Walter and it was one of the best books I’ve read in while, so I decide to share my review of it for this post. Most of the stories take place in Seattle, Portland, or Spokane and it came out in 2013.

            There are a total of 13 stories that cover varying situations from two drug addicts, who are in search of a wheelbarrow to transport a big screen TV across town and to a futuristic world where people are turning themselves into overly sexed zombies in order to escape the modern world and with government training them to not to eat cat.   In the story “Virgo,” a man seeks revenge on his ex-girlfriend by re-wring horoscopes, “keep an eye on the big picture,’ Virgo was supposed to read that day.  I changed it to: ‘One star: watch your back.’” (p. 62)  I felt the stories were a good mixture of humor and the complexities of human relationships.

 The title story, “We Live in Water,” is the most powerful story, which is told from both a father and son perspective in differing decades.  It starts in 1958 with Oren, the father, who is recently divorced, a drifter, and swindler.  Oren has stolen from the wrong man in a small town and takes Michael, his six year old son, to meet up with his friend, whom he hopes can help him out of this jam.  Then flash forward to 1992, where Michael is all grown up and we find him recently divorced and on a mission to find his father who went missing in 1958.  The story continues flashing to the past and then back to the present.  The closing lines are almost poetic, “he came back to that morning on the carrier, the blue sky and the ocean, and where they met, that endless line.  Everything that isn’t sky and water lives for a moment in that gray band.  Above and below it, the blue stretches forever.” (p. 40)    

The final story, “Statistical Abstract for My Hometown, Spokane, Washington,” is small autobiography of Jess Walter, put into fifty different notes about life in Spokane.  This essay gives you a feel of the authors own life and you can now draw connections into the fictional stories that proceed in the book.  Specific things I learned about Spokane it is the 104^th biggest city in the United States, that many adult men like to ride BMX bikes, that bikes tend to be stolen on a regular basis, , and the poverty rate is high.  To conclude, Walter stories are very well written and you connect to the characters that are all facing the hard realities of this world.  He also adds humor into the situations, which is always good in my book.  So I’ve given the book 4 out of 5 stars.