Book Title/Author: We Are Water by Wally Lamb
Publication Date/Publisher: October 22, 2013/Harper
Series: No
Source and Format: Received e-ARC from publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review
Rating: 4 stars
From Goodreads:
In middle age, Annie Oh—wife, mother, and outsider artist—has shaken her family to its core. After twenty-seven years of marriage and three children, Annie has fallen in love with Viveca, the wealthy, cultured, confident Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success.
Annie and Viveca plan to wed in the Oh family’s hometown of Three Rivers, Connecticut, where gay marriage has recently been legalized. But the impending wedding provokes some very mixed reactions and opens a Pandora’s box of toxic secrets—dark and painful truths that have festered below the surface of the Ohs’ lives.
We Are Water is an intricate and layered portrait of marriage, family, and the inexorable need for understanding and connection, told in the alternating voices of the Ohs—nonconformist Annie; her ex-husband, Orion, a psychologist; Ariane, the do-gooder daughter, and her twin, Andrew, the rebellious only son; and free-spirited Marissa, the youngest Oh. Set in New England and New York during the first years of the Obama presidency, it is also a portrait of modern America, exploring issues of class, changing social mores, the legacy of racial violence, and the nature of creativity and art.
Wally Lamb’s 1998 masterpiece I Know This Much is True is one of my most re-read and most loved books. I also very much enjoyed The Hour I First Believed, but can’t recall ever re-reading it. I remember reading She’s Come Undone when I was MUCH too young (around 10 or 12 maybe?) at my grandma’s house one summer vacation in between my mountains of library books. I own but have yet to read Couldn’t Keep it to Myself – a collection of stories written by women prisons Lamb worked with.
Readers familiar with Wally Lamb’s work will of course notice the similar themes – we’re obviously in Three Rivers, Connecticut – twins, Italian family, immigrant family history (and a character writing a book about it), disabled and religious family members, unknown/unknowable father, how to love and be loved when you are at your most unlovable, and just a tiny bit of mysticism.
“Destiny shuffles the cards, but we are the ones who must play the game.”
We Are Water takes place in the days leading up to Annie Oh’s wedding to another woman and is told from several perspectives. Almost every character gets at least one chapter to explain his or herself. Mostly we hear from Annie, her ex-husband Orion, and her son Andrew. Most chapters have long passages of memories – to explain why these characters are the way they are and why they’re doing what they’re doing. Some chapters are from almost 30 years ago (or more) so we can see some horrors unfold in real time. Seeing everything it took to create this family is heartbreaking.
The memories and past chapters are important so we can see the events happen and the reaction they set off that completes the circle – Wally Lamb loves to close off the circle – and it’s a little bit bigger than rabbits this time.
“‘We are like water, aren’t we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too.’ And something else, I think to myself.”
Paperback Heart 