The water cure A novel

Review by New York Times Review

IN MOST APOCALYPTIC TALES, the reader is expected to accept certain baseline assumptions. The first is that the apocalypse is real; the second, that the story's main characters represent its truest victims. Sophie Mackintosh subverts both of these assumptions in her sumptuous yet sparsely written debut, "The Water Cure," which was longlisted for last year's Man Booker Prize. On an island somewhere near a mainland, three girls grow up under the care of their father, called King, and their nameless mother. King seeks to keep them all safe from a peculiar plague that, among other things, makes women effectively allergic to men. Nearly everything in the preceding sentence is questionable, however - including the nature of King's fatherly love, as it immediately becomes clear that his oldest daughter, Grace, is pregnant by him. This questionable love also plays out via bizarre "therapies" to which the three girls are subjected in order to purify them of unspecified toxins. The girls are kept on a strange diet and made to sweat themselves into unconsciousness in saunas, freeze their hands in buckets of ice water, hold their breath until they pass out. Knowing no better, they are willing participants; to them, this is the only safe love, given that they have been taught to fear strangers - especially men. Men other than King, that is. In one of the cruelest therapies, the family "draws the irons," small tokens that determine who among them is permitted to be the focus of the others' love. Middle girl Lia is the one most often left love-deficient - which has devastating effects when King vanishes and, later, three strangers come to the island. The strangers are two adult men and a young boy, apparent refugees from whatever is happening on the mainland. When one of the men shows sexual interest in Lia, she responds with greedy desperation, and all three sisters react through the warped and violent lens of what love means to them. So is this an apocalyptic tale of women surviving in a world that has turned strange and cruel? Perhaps more a tale of patriarchal family structures taken to an extreme - the father as both predator and god, the mother a collaborator who occasionally protects, all three daughters hovering in a limbo somewhere between cherished possessions and future concubines for the patriarch. There is also a distinctly cultlike element to the family dynamics, from the myths that both parents weave in order to maintain control, to the unquestioning relentlessness shown by Sky, the coddled youngest daughter, whenever something threatens the family home. It's this cultishness that muddies the thematic waters of this novel. At first glance "The Water Cure" seems to be in conversation with Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," or 1970s feminist dystopias like Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast Chronicles or Sheri S. Tepper's "The Gate to Women's Country." In the latter books, women's physical weakness encourages male excess, which puts the whole species at risk. As King and Mother frequently remind their daughters, women's bodies are inherently fragile and vulnerable to corruption. Yet the unspoken interstices of the story, to which Mackintosh delicately draws the reader's attention with haunting, oblique prose, emphasize just how much hogwash the parents are feeding their daughters. The reader knows, for example, that love is limitless and need not be counted out like coins; that physical and sexual abuse can only warp what love there is; and that the daughters' ignorance of the wider world keeps them as dependent as it does pure. "You girls are a new and shining kind of woman," King tells them, proudly - after he has raised them vitamin-deficient and weakened by his therapies, and ignorant of basic human biology. Their isolation is a privilege and their ignorance is innocence, or so they are told. So they believe. But it is increasingly clear to the reader that these young women have simply been raised to fit their patriarch's ideal of what pure, fragile, privileged white womanhood should be. (Since, after all, the notion that women are fragile and in need of protection to maintain purity is not accorded to all women.) But what King has actually created on his island are three young women who are trained to privation, and who - lacking anything but his myths to believe in - are frighteningly focused on their own survival. Foot soldiers. How much money must King have had, to own a house off the grid and keep a family of five supplied for decades? The family does get some income, it is implied, by treating women from the mainland who come seeking therapies, including the "water cure" of the title. But since the reader also knows that being drowned has never cured women of anything - quite the opposite - we are left to wonder what King has told these women, and why they believe him. And how powerful that belief must be, since sometimes the cure seems to be effective. Then again, faith healing always has a few success stories. That's how the con works. What is patriarchy, after all, but a con being run on all genders, whispering to both victims and beneficiaries that any suffering they experience is for their own good? Until the followers start to realize they've been had. Perhaps their rage can be a kind of cure, too - one that's hopefully more effective than drowning. The girls hover in a limbo somewhere between cherished possessions and future concubines. N. K. jemisin is a three-time Hugo winner. Her short-story collection, "How Long 'Til Black Future Month?," was published in November.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Aptly named patriarch King repairs to an island with his wife and daughters to escape an unnamed cataclysm. Even though for a time they welcomed castaway women, the daughters are taught to fear strangers, especially men, who are considered toxic. This insular, hothouse environment, though meant to protect the girls, also sequesters them from being able to adjudge their parents' stringent "exercises" as little more than torture. When King disappears, the daughters' carefully crafted world begins to crumble, and emotions (which the exercises were meant to curb) bubble up. When three related males arrive in King's wake, the sisters, formerly bound in love-hate lockstep, find their sisterhood weakening as each female sorts out events. The slow unfurling of the truth of their lives parallels the daughters' slow awakening to the realities of the world. In Mackintosh's skilled hands, readers encounter this world as if in a fever dream and float on its characters' disparate and shifting points of view. Book clubs may enjoy discussing the dystopian and feminist themes of Mackintosh's exciting debut.--Joan Curbow Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Mackintosh's intense, ambitious debut, longlisted for the Man Booker, evokes a feminist dystopia where three sisters live in isolation meant to protect them from a toxic world that has become particularly dangerous for women. At an unspecified time in the future, global warming and pollution have poisoned the planet, making men more violent and women vulnerable. One couple, King and Mother, choose to raise their three daughters surrounded by sea and barbwire; their only visitors are women seeking therapies like the water cure (near-drowning to fortify against toxins and fear). Mother teaches her daughters-caustic 20-something Grace, touch-hungry teenage Lia, and their youngest, Sky-to suppress emotions, love only each other, and prepare for the worst. Then King disappears, and two men and a boy wash ashore. Mother shows her daughters how to use a pistol before she too disappears. Grace, Lia, and Sky are left to fend for themselves as the men grow impatient, proprietary, and threatening. The sisters' impressionistic narratives, presented solo and in chorus, show Lia's self-mutilation in close-up while the world disorder is described indirectly through its aftereffects. Mackintosh's gripping novel is vicious in its depiction of victimhood, vibrant when victims transform into warriors, and full of outrage at patriarchal power, environmental devastation, and the dehumanization of women. (Jan.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

DEBUT This first novel from award-winning short story writer Mackintosh is set on the edge of a postapocalyptic world. Three sisters, Grace, Lia, and Sky, live in a moldering spa hotel with their mother and a father called King. The parents have kept the young women isolated from the mainland, where environmental toxicity and gender wars have ravaged the female population; Grace's pregnancy can only be the result of incest. The hotel somehow has running water and a pool, and the girls languish in shabby luxury. Occasionally, damaged women arrive on the shore, and the mother gives them a water cure, which involves salt water purges and muslin wraps. The tension ratchets up when King fails to return from a trip to the mainland for provisions, and their insulated women's world is violated when two men and a boy wash up on the beach. VERDICT This image-laden and lyrical first novel, its short chapters interspersed with brief, disturbing messages from women from the mainland, imagines a societal breakdown that has inflicted most of its harm on women, which seems both frightening and inevitable, offering a dark, extended ­metaphor on toxic male/female relations. [See Prepub Alert, 7/9/18.]-Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Three sisters, secreted away during a global crisis of male violence, learn to fight for their survival in this spare, dystopian debut.Grace, Lia, and Sky follow the rituals enforced by their mother and their father, King, the only man they've ever known. The strange family lives in an isolated, crumbling mansion by the sea, where women arrive to receive the family's storied water cures and heal from violent pasts. They look like "they had been bled out, their skin limp. Eyes watering involuntarily, hair thinning," recalls Lia, and the sisters learn to fear a world that visits so much violence on its women. There are water cures for everything: to purify toxins from the outside world, illness, grief, too much feeling. The rituals themselves are often violent, requiring drowning or self-harm. When the novel opens, the sisters are mourning the death of King and the discovery of Grace's pregnancy, which disrupts their harmony and fractures their routines. To complicate matters, three men wash up on shore and beg for entry. Met with deep suspicion and relegated to the beach, the men become figures of both fascination and fear. Mackintosh alternates between the sisters' collective voices and the heartbreaking narratives of Grace and Lia. Despite being warned by her sisters and mother to stay away, Lia begins her first love affair with Llew, who is by turns charming, careless, and cruel. Grace gives birth to King's stillborn baby boy, an experience that isolates her from her younger sisters and her mother, who inexplicably disappears. While the narrative at times veers toward the pedantic, it's both shocking and refreshing to see the observations women make to one anotherabout the specific, learned cruelties and emotional violence of menrepresented so plainly on the page. "It was no one big thing but many small things," one of the patients writes in the house Welcome Book. "Each one chipped away at me. By the end, I felt skinless." Ultimately, Grace, Lia, and Sky must make a choice: to trust the men or to save one another.An evocative coming-of-age novel that captures the fear, rage, and yearning of three women growing up in a time of heightened violence. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Grace, Lia, Sky   Once we had a father, but our father dies without us noticing. It's wrong to say that we don't notice. We are just absorbed in ourselves, that afternoon when he dies. Unseasonable heat. We squabble, as usual. Mother comes out on the terrace and puts a stop to it by raising her hand, a swift motion against the sky. Then we spend some time lying down with lengths of muslin over our faces, trying not to scream, and so he dies with none of us women bearing witness, none of us accompanying him. It is possible we drove him away, that the energy escaped our bodies despite our attempts to stifle it and became a smog clinging around the house, the forest, the beach. That was where we last saw him. He put a towel on the ground and lay down parallel to the sea, flat on the sand. He was resting, letting sweat gather along his top lip, his bare head. The interrogation begins at dinner when he fails to turn up. Mother pushes the food and plates from the table in her agitation, one sweep of the arm, and we search the endless rooms of the house. He is not in the kitchen, soaking fish in a tub of brine, or pulling up withered potatoes outside, inspecting the soil. He is not on the terrace at the top of the house, surveying the still surface of the pool three floors below, and he is certainly not in the pool itself, for the sound of his splashing is always violent enough to carry. He is not in the lounge, nor the ballroom, the piano untouched, the velvet curtains heavy with undisturbed dust. Moving up the staircase again, a spine through the centre of the house, we check our rooms individually, our bathrooms, though we know he will not be there. From our scattered formation we come together to search the garden, search deeper, sticking long branches into the pond's green murk. Eventually we are out on the beach and we realize one of the boats has gone too--a furrow in the sand where it has been pushed out. For a moment we think he has gone for supplies, but then we remember he was not wearing the protective white suit, we did not do the leaving ceremony, and we look towards the rounded glow of the horizon, the air peach-ripe with toxicity. And Mother falls to her knees. Our father had a big and difficult body. When he sat down, his swimming shorts rode up and exposed the whiteness of his thigh where it was usually covered. If you killed him, it would be like pushing over a sack of meat. It would require someone much stronger than us. The father shape he leaves behind quickly becomes a hollow that we can put our grief into, which is an improvement in a way.     Grace   I ask Mother if she had noticed any sickness in you. Any hint of your body giving way. She says, "No, your father was in fine fettle." Dark turn. "As you well fucking know." Your body was not completely all right. Of course I would see that where she would not. I noticed a slight cough, mixed up a honey tincture for you the day before you died. Boiled nettles from the end of the garden, where we dump our rubbish and leave things to rot. My hands blistering as I pulled them from the earth in flat afternoon heat. You drank it straight from the saucepan. Sunburnt throat moving under the metal. We were sitting in the kitchen together, two stools pushed close. Your eyes were watery. You did not touch me. On the counter, three sardines spilled their guts. "Are you dying?" I asked you. "No," you said. "In many ways, I have never been better."       Lia   Confirmation comes in the shape of his bloodstained shoe washed up high on the shore. Mother finds it, but we don't salt it or burn it the way we would with other dangerous waste. "This is your father!" she screams at me when I suggest it. So instead we pull on latex gloves and we all touch the blood patch on the shoe, and then we bury it in the forest. We fling the gloves into the shoe's open grave and Mother fills it in with a shovel. I cry on to Grace's shoulder until the flesh of it shows through the material of her dress, but she only stares into the canopy above us with dry eyes. "Can you feel something, for once?" I whisper to her later in the dark, sharing her bed without asking permission. "I hope you die in the night," she whispers back. Often Grace is repelled by me. I don't have the luxury of being repelled by her, even when her breath is sour and a gentle scum of dirt clings to her ankles. I take whatever contact I can get. Sometimes I harvest the hair from her brush and hide it under my pillow, when things get very bad. Grace has a deep fascination with a pair of black patent sandals that one of the women left behind years ago. She straps them on from time to time even though the soles flap loose, the leather scales and flakes. One morning she puts them on and lies facedown in the sweating dew, right in the middle of the garden. When Sky and I find her, roll her over with our hands, she is motionless for thirty seconds or more. Her eyes are fixed. Her first movement is to rend at her hair, and we join in like it's a game, but it turns out it's a cue that I didn't even know I was waiting for. Then we are all just useless there on the lawn, already painfully overgrown, waiting for Mother to find us. Because we are new to mourning, Mother is panicked. There are no therapies for this unknown crisis. But she is a resourceful woman, ardently repairing the broken her entire life. More than that, she was a woman at our father's side, absorbing and refining his theories. Her hands are bloodless when she lays them upon us. Soon a solution is found. For one week, Sky and I share Grace's bed. For one week, Mother puts the small blue insomnia tablets on our tongues three to four times a day. Short and foggy breaks in the sleep to be slapped awake, to drink from the glasses of water that crowd the bedside table and to eat crackers Mother spreads with peanut butter, to crawl to the bathroom, because by the third day our legs can no longer be relied upon to hold us. The heavy curtains stay closed to keep the light out, to keep the temperature down. "What are you feeling?" Mother asks us during those swims up to consciousness. "Good, bad? Oh, I know that I wish I could sleep through all of this. You are the lucky ones." She monitors our breathing, our pulses. Sky throws up and Mother is there immediately to tenderly scoop the vomit from her mouth with her forefinger and thumb. When she puts her into the bathtub to clean her up we are dimly aware of the shower running like a distant storm. All through the long sleep my dreams are boxes filled with boxes filled with small trapdoors. I keep thinking I am awake, and then my arms fall off or the sky pulses a livid green, I am outside with my fingers in the sand and the sea is vertical, spilling its seams. After, it takes a few days for my body to feel normal again. My knees still crumple when I stand. I have bitten my tongue, and it swells and moves in my mouth like a grub against dry earth.       Grace, Lia, Sky When we emerge from the lost week, we are surrounded by pieces of paper with Mother's writing on like reminders. They are pinned to the walls, slipped into drawers, folded into our clothes. The pieces of paper say, No more love! Her pain gives her the gravity of an oracle. We are very troubled by them. We ask her about them and she tells us a revised version. "Love only your sisters!" All right, we decide, that is easy enough for us to do. "And your mother," she adds. "You have to love me too. It's my right." OK, we tell her. It is no problem.       Grace   Sometimes we pray in the ballroom, sometimes in Mother's bedroom. It depends on whether we need bombast, Mother on the stage with her arms raised towards the ceiling, sound bouncing from the parquet. In her bedroom it is a quieter worship, graver. We hold hands very tightly, so we can blur where the I ends and the sister begins. "Devotions for the women of our blood," we say. It feels good to wish my sisters only well. I can feel them focusing on our love like a crucial piece of information that needs memorizing. "Sometimes," Mother tells us, when she is trying to be loving, "I can no longer tell you girls apart." Some days we like this, some days we don't. The first time we gather to pray in Mother's room after your death, I broach the idea of drawing the irons again. When I say it nobody nods, nobody agrees with me. Our eyes go to where they hang on her wall. Five hooks, five lengths of iron. Five names above the hooks, but only four names on the irons. "Once a year, Grace," Mother tells me. "Just because you don't like the result." Lia looks sideways at me. She was the one who drew the blank iron, which meant that there was no specific love allocated to her this year. "Bad luck," we told her. She was stoic. All of us put our arms around her and told her that of course we would still love her, of course, but we knew it wouldn't be the same, that she would have to scramble more for the affection, that it wouldn't come as easily. We wouldn't be able to touch her so freely. You picked me, as usual, tying me to you for another year. You rigged it. The whole thing was a sham. "My person is dead," I point out. "Grief is love," Mother says. I expect her to be angry, but she looks panicked instead. "You could call it the purest kind." So much for loving only my sisters. It occurs to me that I would like you to come back to life so I could kill you myself. "We always love some people more," Mother explained when we first drew them. "This way, we can keep it fair. Everyone gets their turn." It seemed simple, with those irons new in our hands and our names painted fresh upon them. Lia got me, that time. We would all still love each other, but what it meant was: if there was a burning fire, if two sisters were stuck in the inferno and they were screaming a name, the only right thing would be to pick the one the iron dictated to save. It is important to ignore any contrary instinct of your traitor heart. We were quite used to that. Excerpted from The Water Cure: A Novel All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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