Book review: “The Waters” by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Picture this: Six goofily regular guys in the middle of the night are stumbling neck-deep in a turbid bog, called the Waters, in a stumblebum effort to carry Rose Thorn Zook, a pregnant woman they’ve known all their lives, to the island where her family has lived for generations and where she wants to give birth.

Darling slipped and lost hold of Rose Thorn’s leg, and, somehow, Two-Inch Tony managed to throw his arm out of the mud and catch it, briefly sinking up over the bottoms of his ears. His heart pounded in fear of such a drowning, but he pushed on. They all pushed forward through the pudding-thick quickmuck with Whitby, Dickmon, and Standish supporting most of Rose Thorn’s weight…[T]hey all felt, in carrying out this task, as intimate as they had ever felt with other people.

This is the climax of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s 2024 novel The Waters, and it captures — in its frenetic slapstick and casual deep affection and heart-core confusion and astonishment at the windings of life — the pulse of Campbell’s story about a community of people, a kind of family of people, in rural Michigan.

As Campbell writes about another character in the final pages of the novel:

He has never been more afraid. Or more confused. Or more alive.

This character is Titus Jr., the longtime love of Rose Thorn, who, at the moment, is voluntarily — against his better judgement — holding a rattlesnake whose bite would be deadly for him with his family inheritance of hemophilia.

 

“Overeager storybook dwarves”

It’s like something out of a fairy tale…which is what, in part, Campbell’s The Waters is.

Moments before her journey across the bog, Rose Thorn, huge with child, walked out of the darkness to the Boneset Table, on the edge of the bog, where the six men had gathered because they couldn’t sleep and had to go somewhere. Through a previous summer, the beautiful and beautifully welcoming Rose Thorn had been the center of evening gatherings at the Table for conversation, music and lazy drinking.

“Like drones buzzing around their queen to warm her,” the men now pressed around her until Dickmon pushed them back to give her room.

She wanted to get away from these annoying and frustrating men to figure out what came next, but she also loved them profoundly, loved their uncertainty and clumsiness, their earnest desire to help, their loyalty. They were like overeager storybook dwarves in their various stages of inebriation, and they needed her love and appreciation — and their neediness exhausted her.

Not only are they the Six Dwarves, but also the dopey “six-headed mucky monster” that — as Rose Thorn’s tall, whip-smart, eleven-year-old daughter Dorothy, known as Donkey, watches — delivers her mother across the bog to the island and then delivers Rose Thorn’s baby in true Who’s-On-First? fashion.

 

“Once upon a time”

The novel’s prologue begins, “Once upon a time…” And that’s how Chapters 1, 6, and 15 begin. For instance:

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Love isn’t everything

Once upon a time, the next morning to be precise, November first, when Donkey was 4,200 days old, she awoke to the sound of mooing and a layer of white frost on the ground.

The mooing is coming from Delilah, her family’s cow on the island, and Donkey goes to milk her. On the way back, she is “gently slapped awake” by the cold air.

Near the poison garden, she startled at a sight as exotic as a m’sauga [rattlesnake] — something from a fairy tale, something she’d seen only a few times in her life. She lay on her belly and inched closer to the wingstem stalks to see ribbons of ice exuded from the burst-open stems in the shape of a coiled serpent or a complicated rose or a swirl of elegantly whipped cream. A frost flower!

In terms of cold-blooded realism, a frost flower is just a frost flower.  But, in The Waters, the frost flower can be seen as a metaphor for how mundane, gritty things can combine to create beauty. As they do on the island in the Waters and in the community around it.

 

“One creature”

The six men who carry Rose Thorn across the bog aren’t the only fairy tale monster conjured up by Campbell in The Waters.

At an earlier point, Donkey is sitting in the kitchen of Rose Cottage on the island as her mother, Rose Thorn, and her aunts, Primrose and Maryrose, called Molly, are cooking. Their mother Hermine, called Herself, is in the cowshed.

The three shiny blond heads leaned toward the lamp flame. With steam and a bit of black smoke swirling, the image conjured a fairy-tale vision, with Rose Thorn’s long tangled hair splayed across her back so voluminously it could have wrapped around all three of them. Together, these sisters were one creature with six arms and legs, animated by flame, not subject to the earth’s gravity as much as to one another’s. 

Herself comes into the room with her pail of milk.

The three-headed monster that had solidified before Donkey’s eyes now became three separate women again. Rose Thorn grinned. Prim blanched. Molly gasped and stood from Hermoine’s chair.

Then, in a comment that, to many readers, will recall the Three Witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth which, themselves, recall three Fates of classical mythology, Herself says:

“The Fates are conspiring.”

 

Afraid, confused and live

I suspect that many people who have read The Waters will be surprised and perhaps displeased that I began this review with references to the male characters in the novel. Without question, the men in the book are secondary actors.

Yet, the way Campbell portrays the men is the same way she portrays the women — as human beings equally at sea in the chaos of breathing every day.

The Waters centers around the five women of Dorothy’s family — Herself, her three daughters and her granddaughter.  It grapples with what it means to be a woman in a society that includes men. Here is where fairy tale meets the “real” world.

As much as Travis Jr. and the other men in the book, the Zook women are afraid, confused and alive.

As strong as these women are — and they are huge personalities, five suns in a community of lesser stars — they are intensely aware of how little control they have over their lives. They are also aware of how confusing life is — and how vibrant they feel. And how everyone is linked to everyone.

Herself, for instance, has an immense set of knowledge and wisdom about folk remedies and cures, but, at eighty, she knows she cannot live much longer — and knows that she will soon not be able to continue to care for/protect/worry about her daughters and granddaughter. Nor will she be able to protect the island from the other people of this rural Michigan community, people she calls the brutes of Nowhere.

 

28 cowry shells

One of the confusions that she and her daughters and granddaughter have to face has to do with the folk remedy that — sometimes, not always — she had given to pregnant women, crushed by the the pain and burden of another pregnancy and, then, another child to raise.

Herself pays a price when a confused local man, upset about these abortion, fires a rifle into Rose Cottage. More than that, though, she is aware that, in helping a woman to end a pregnancy, she is ending the possibility of another life.

Indeed, she wears a necklace of 28 cowry shells that she calls, as something of what seems like penance, cuntshells.

 

“Energy and light”

Late in the novel, Donkey wears the necklace to sleep each night, soothed “to listen to the whispers of those souls not born, souls who Herself had said were preparing to travel on in their own time.”

Most of what she heard from the string of clinking bodies was laughter, and what she felt was a tickling energy and a sweet pure light rising from someplace without fear or desire, a place of healing kindness without this life’s uncertainties.

Some of the energy and light she sensed might have come from the relieved and renewed souls of the women who had been freed from burdens they could not endure; this energy having a second chance permeated Donkey’s body when she wore the necklace.

 

The complexity of getting up

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters is a rich, spiritual, humane and very human look at a family and a community trying to negotiate each day a way through life.  It is a complex novel about the complexity of getting up every day and going about the day’s business.

It is a story we all know — the story of being afraid and confused and alive.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

8.6.26