Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters follows three generations of tough women living in the Great Massasauga Swamp of unincorporated Whiteheart, Michigan. Hermine “Herself” Zook has firmly established herself as a figure of myth and mystery. She makes elixirs, tonics, and medicines for the people of the town, including women with unwanted pregnancies. When Hermine’s youngest daughter, Rose Thorn, returns home from a romp in California, she leaves the baby, Donkey, with Hermine. Most of the book takes place over a course of a few months in Donkey’s eleventh year. She is precocious, funny, anxious, and obsessed with math—one of my favorite child characters in recent memory. She doesn’t attend school but is instead raised by Hermine and the land, learning the ways of the “mosquito-infested no-man’s-land of tussocks, marshes, shallows, hummocks, pools, streams and springs” and the mythic m’sauga rattlesnake—or, as the town calls it, “muck rattler.” After an accident, Hermine’s health takes a steep decline, and Donkey takes up the reins, secretly making the medicines and foraging sumac and snakeroot. Hermine’s three daughters, Molly, Primrose, and Rose Thorn, return home to help. The town gets squeezed by encroaching big agriculture, creeping industry, and religious zealots who might not want the women to live off the land in their overgrown cottage dreamscape. Donkey tries to navigate the bafflements of a mother who may or may not stick around for good, the unruly men who shoot at the cabin for fun when they get drunk, and a town that seems hell bent on raising their property. The book is part myth—“once upon a time” is a common refrain—part gritty realistic fiction, part coming-of-age, and part odyssey. The world is lushly described, and it is neither magical nor full-blown realism, but somewhere in between. Most novels suffer from soggy middles, but not The Waters. Tensions continually escalate, mysteries abound, and under every rock in the muck of this swamp lies another myth to parse, another anecdote to consider, sexual violence to unveil, and another colorful character to root for and against (often in the same paragraph). This is Campbell’s sixth work of fiction, and it is her best. It should serve as an example of how to write lush but not purple and gorgeously descriptive without wasting a word. I was lucky to get to talk to Bonnie Jo while she was out for a walk after a long day of writing. Some of the audio is choppy here, and I’ve done my best to clean it up, but hopefully that just adds to the charm. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
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