Sweetwater
By Roxana Robinson
Random House, 319 pages, $24.95
With a keen eye for the deportment of society’s upper echelons and an uncanny ability to plumb the depths of characters’ thoughts, Roxana Robinson has earned comparisons to Henry James and John Cheever. She knows the characters she brings to the page. She has lived with them, it seems, or at least observed them stringently. She knows what they wear and how they speak. She knows what anger they deem suitable for public display, what vulnerabilities they won’t relinquish, what love is supposed to look like, how love is supposed to acquiesce. Robinson knows the rules by which her characters are expected to live. She knows the consequences of flouting established conventions.
“Sweetwater,” Robinson’s newest novel, is being touted by her publisher as her “commercial breakthrough” book. Its hero is an environmentalist named Isabel, a widow frozen in grief and guilt who says yes to a second marriage when it seems that nothing else will wake her up. Everything about Isabel is seemingly pacific when we first meet her. She is, at 47, emotionally stilled. “All the other things–wildness and bliss and desperation, rage, the urgency of sex–lay behind her,” the narrator tells us. “She no longer expected them. What she aimed for now was loyalty and affection. Much of marriage was partnership; she didn’t want to be old alone.”
Paul, the man Isabel says yes to, seems reasonable enough at first. Tall, thin, protective, patient, a man Isabel associates with the words “tender pleading,” he is willing to wait for Isabel to feel some semblance of the passion he feels for her. He doesn’t press, but he doesn’t stop hoping either, and this hope is like a question Isabel knows she’ll have to answer.
Most of the present-day action in “Sweetwater” takes places on a generous expanse of land in the Adirondacks, where Paul’s family owns a private lodge and three cabins. Isabel’s first foray there takes place seven months into their marriage, and as she makes her way through the land, as she learns to canoe on the lake, as she spends time with Paul’s parents as well as his handsome, provocative brother, Whit, we are privy to her thoughts. “Maybe this will work,” she tells herself at one point. Moving forward, she acknowledges later, “was why she had married Paul.”
But Paul doesn’t provide the spark that Michael, Isabel’s first husband, provided. He isn’t daring, glittering, challenging, irresistible, nor does he seem to be nearly so complicated. Falling in love with Paul will mean letting Michael go, and to let Michael go, Isabel must allow herself to fully remember him–the good times and the bad times, the horrifying final day of his existence. Half of the book is therefore devoted to cleanly organized flashbacks, to the story of Isabel and Michael’s fiery love affair and to the alternately crushing and beautiful condition of their marriage. Robinson is particularly good at generating an urgency about these lovers’ early conversations, particularly persuasive when she reveals that Michael, so alive and so energetic most of the time, also suffered from deep bouts of depression.
The day Michael proposes to Isabel is the day he also first admits to having once had a breakdown, a collision of events that yields the book’s most exquisite passage:
“And her memory of that evening, when Michael proposed to her and they agreed that their lives from then on would be joined, always included the two moments–the first at the restaurant, Michael, his face alight, leaning toward her across the tiny table . . . when he seemed powerful and open, charged with vitality and tenderness, a moment quick with possibility and life. Then there was this other, later moment, when Michael sat turned away from her on the bed, his back exposed, talking about fear, his voice revealing the memory of that black enveloping paralysis.”
Robinson, in “Sweetwater,” has a lot to say about the earth. Isabel’s personal passion is water, which she loves for “its transparency, its lucidity, its radiance,” and which she is determined to try to help protect through her position at an environmental organization. Whit is a conservation biologist who makes his home in Wyoming and is capable of giving spontaneous lectures on, for example, the movements of the mountain lion. While the environmental writing in this book is lyrical and thoroughly researched, the themes and issues don’t readily attach to the characters to whom Robinson assigns them. One is aware of all the metaphors, of course, between the land and the life-seeking, cleansing-needing protagonists, but the lessons about the environment tend to be episodic and didactic. They never achieve that difficult-to-achieve sense of being integral to characters or plot.
“Sweetwater,” in so many ways, is about learning to forgive oneself, and Robinson’s primary fixation is, without question, Isabel. Her development and evolution, her shaking off of past and present bonds, her emergence as a woman returned from the purgatory of grief are well timed and credible, thoroughly moving, deeply felt. One feels in touch with Isabel. She is never off the page, never hiding behind plot, never noticeably manipulated.
By paying such close attention to Isabel, however, Robinson at times loses her touch with the novel’s other heroes. Paul, for example, appears to become what the plot requires of him; after many pages spent on his patience and goodness, he quickly devolves into a bore and a cad. Michael, too, rather abruptly loses his complexity and charm, and Whit, as the book’s true romantic hero, is sometimes painted with excessive sheen.
And yet one cannot read this book without appreciating Robinson’s unmitigated dedication not just to her story and her themes, but to the Adirondacks themselves: the water, the air, the trees, the seeds, the germinating stuff of life. “She wanted to reach out and grab lapels, to cry into faces, to shout out the truth so that it would be indelibly known,” Robinson writes of Isabel as the character negotiates a conversation about pollution. “To plead, Don’t you see?”
A novelist’s first job is to open readers’ eyes, and this Robinson does with grace and style.
