The Waters by Bonnie Jo Campbell

The Waters

By Bonnie Jo Campbell

WW Norton 2024

The title of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s savagely beautiful new novel refers to a sedgy, overgrown, snake-infested patch of swampland between the Old Woman River and the small town of Whiteheart, Michigan. The Waters swarm with mosquitos and choke with sucking black mud, but the island at the heart of it all is nevertheless inhabited; in addition to crows and bugs and the protected Massauga rattlesnake, M’sauga Island is home to an old woman named Hermine “Herself” Zook, known to the town’s older inhabitants as a folk-healer, a witchy-woman who mostly keeps to herself but was once the dispenser of homemade medicinal remedies – mashed roots for toothache, crushed leaves for insomnia, and milky little jars of antivenin. 

When, decades ago, some of Herself’s antivenin saved the life of a prominent Whitewater man named Wild Will, who responded by marrying her and building her a big new house where she refused to live. Later, when she expelled him from her life, the people of Whitewater noticed a change in her medicines, which were no less effective but more caustic and raw, which seemed oddly congruent to her patients … “they became mistrustful of a cure that didn’t include a punishment, that didn’t intensify momentarily the suffering it promised to alleviate.” 

As well known in town as Herself are her three daughters: the oldest, Primrose, left town and works as a lawyer in California, fighting for the disenfranchised. The middle daughter, Molly, hard-headed and practical, is studying the exact kind of institutional “devil-doctor” medicine her mother scorns. And Campbell describes the youngest, 18-year-old Rose Thorn, as a beautiful and almost ethereally uplifting creature, feckless but dreamlike, badly missed by the Whitewater men since she abruptly left to visit her sister Primrose a few months before the novel opens. And none missed her more than handsome 24-year-old Titus Clay Junior, the “Prince of the town,” heir to the prosperous Whtieheart Farms and son of Titus Clay Senior, “the great upright farmer in a world of certainty.” Titus Jr. and Rose Thorn were deeply in love and moving steadily to marriage when suddenly she had disappeared. 

The Waters starts when she comes back. Some of the men of the town see her walking down the lane one evening, a strange apparition played out against the omnipresent natural background of the book: “In the ditch on the Waters side of Lovers Road, male redwing blackbirds trilled for mates from the swaying tops of cattails. Chorus frogs creaked, and green frogs twanged,” one such passage goes. “M’sauga rattlesnakes buzzed, and the men’s trigger fingers itched to shoot them, if they could only catch a glimpse.” (The men know this snake is legally protected, but “protecting something venomous seemed plan wrong, like defending sin.”)

Although he’s delighted to see his beloved return, Titus Junior has two shocks in store: Rose Thorn is carrying a newborn baby girl in her backpack – and the child isn’t his (a third and far worse shock is shared with the reader but initially spared Titus Junior: little baby Dorothy is the result of a rape Rose Thorn suffered at the hands of Titus Senior). He’s stunned and angry, but Rose Thorn’s priorities are elsewhere: she very much wants Herself to help her take care of the baby. Herself, withdrawn into her own little world, agrees to do anything she can; one of the first actions she takes, indeed, the horrifying story of why little Dorothy is known as Donkey, is one of the many bare-knuckle brutalities in these pages that very decidedly stop this novel from being some kind of rural idyll. 

Campbell’s story starts with the arrival of one baby and ends with the arrival of another, and a couple of its recurrent preoccupations briefly threaten to strike irritatingly contemporary notes. More than one woman of M’sauga Island makes offhand reference to the slope-jawed “beasts of nowhere,” and correspondingly, almost all the book’s men (always excepting Titus Junior) are weak or stupid or brutish or violent, any one capable of the mysterious shooting that injures Herself later in the novel. “As they talked on about their weapons, their wives, or their workplaces,” readers are told, “they felt guilt bubbling up inside them, for all of them had shot incautiously, and a .22 bullet could travel half a mile.” Likewise Herself’s distrust of “the medicine of Nowhere” almost looks in the direction of the science-denial that’s now endemic in the 21st century: “An island cure could work exactly right for the person taking it, unlike the crude hospital medicine that didn’t know who or what a person was,” goes one such look. “Hospital medicine was like a hammer blow to the head to kill a mosquito, a blow you hoped didn’t kill you too.” 

But no, in both cases: the men of The Waters are only one-dimensional ogres when seen from M’sauga Island – when she’s exploring their lives in Whitewater, Campbell invests them with a pathetic three-dimensionality that’s often epigrammatic and sometimes funny (the entire cast is forever ripping off choice one-liners at each other’s expense, even in the darkest moments). And the people in the vicinity of the Waters might secretly prize Herself’s folk medicine, it brings her and her women nothing but pain and trouble. By the time the narrative brings all its women together for one epic, protracted scene over food in the kitchen, the sympathy of most readers will be squarely behind Molly’s faith in actual medical science and her peremptory impatience with her mother’s jarred potions and obscure charms.

Campbell wonderfully describes that kitchen scene having the “rich and humid confusion of roasting chicken and other smells,” and “rich and humid confusion” likewise describes the profuse over-abundance of The Waters, her best and most ambitiously multifaceted work of fiction. There are annoying ticks, of course. The Uncle Remus motif about a wise old crow watching over Herself’s cottage is tiresome almost immediately, for instance, and young Donkey’s prized copy of Professor Schweiss’s math book The Garden of Logic is mentioned so often and so facilely that readers will want to chuck it into the swamp. And there’s a sensuous moonlight dance with a rattlesnake that seems to have slithered in from an entirely different novel. 

But such things wilt before the rich and humid confusion of The Waters, which is both the portrait of a dying world and an amazingly honest exploration of the complex relationships between five very different women, one semi-mythical, two practical, and two caught between realities. It’s an unforgettable reading experience, the first serious novel of the new year.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News