How Not to Drown by Jaimee Wriston

Abstract

Reviewed by: How Not to Drown by Jaimee Wriston Em Williamson (bio) how not to drown Jaimee Wriston Alcove Press https://alcovepress.com/book/how-not-to-drown/ 336 pages; Cloth, $27.99 Amid a swirl of aquatic imagery and metaphor, Jaimee Wriston's new novel How Not to Drown ekes out a heartfelt message about climate change and [End Page 97] the ineluctability of family. The novel climaxes with a hurricane that feels as much like an omen for its readers as it does for its characters, though the intrinsic messaging never comes across as didactic or finger-wagging. Instead, through generous and lushly rendered prose, Wriston brings this message to life in the form of a northeastern American family that—sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally—seems constantly on the verge of drowning. The novel follows the frayed family dynamics of the MacQueen-French household along a particularly tumultuous year. We are introduced to the matriarch, Amelia, in the aftermath of her younger son's alleged murder (you guessed it—drowning), after which her unfortunately named granddaughter, Heaven, has moved in to live with her. What unfolds in the course of their unexpected and troubled cohabitation is an occasionally poignant, often messy family drama that has a tendency to lose sight of its own undeniable charms. Wriston is at her best when breathing life into the cast of characters that people her novel. Along with Amelia and Heaven, we are introduced early on to Amelia's forty-something agoraphobe son, Daniel, who has been bound to his childhood bedroom ever since nearly drowning in his youth (are you sensing a theme here?), and Leo, Amelia's photographer ex-husband, who has recently begun a slow decline into dementia. Wriston imbues each of these characters with a fully realized humanity; the MacQueen-Frenches are knotty and complicated people, demanding a reader's attention in the urgency with which they are depicted on the page. Though each of them comes equipped with some noxious trait or another, their flaws never veer into the quirky territory that plagues so many contemporary family dramas. Instead, Wriston writes her characters to life with utmost candor and nurturing attentiveness; observant readers will find themselves sympathizing with each of the disparate worldviews on display, sometimes troublingly so. Oddest among Wriston's cast of characters is Maggie MacQueen, a distant ancestor of Amelia and Heaven. A Scottish emigrant, Maggie exists apart from the contemporary sections of the rest of the novel, narrating her life to us from all the way back in 1852. Through Maggie's first-person narration, we are clued into the family's New England roots and ostensibly provided with some ancestral logic to the family's constant bouts with drowning. Unfortunately, this intergenerational crossover never fully integrates into the novel as [End Page 98] a whole; though no less well written, the Maggie chapters feel excrescent and unfocused when compared to those of the other MacQueen-Frenches. Wriston attempts to adhere these sections by weaving in a discussion of Scottish folklore into the novel's narrative present—Daniel exchanges tales of selkies and sirens with the susceptible Heaven until she determines to become a siren herself—but all this achieves in the end is a wonky sense of the fantastic that isn't quite seen to a satisfying end. What How Not to Drown most successfully depicts is a family at odds with itself, undone by the bonds that tie them all together. Ultimately, Maggie's analeptic chapters only ever feel like a distraction from the novel's more cogent proclivities. Even in its baggier moments, however, How Not to Drown is enlivened by a propulsive verbal energy. Wriston's prose is at once fleet-footed and comprehensive, filled with vivid imagery and stunning observation. Her ability to mine small, awkward interactions for narrative momentum calls to mind writers like Joy Williams or Peter Taylor. One can see this energy at its most crystalline in the interactions between Amelia and Heaven, whose intimately rendered differences and disagreements make for impossible-to-put-down reading. The only handicap to the novel's sharp, forward-moving sentences is its somewhat clunky expository impulse. Occasionally, the novel...