Blue Water
A. Manette Ansay, 2006
HarperCollins
280 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780380732883
Summary
On an ordinary morning in Fox Harbor, Wisconsin, Meg and Rex Van Dorn's lives are irrevocably changed when a drunk driver slams into Meg's car, killing the couple's six-year-old son, Evan. In a town in which everyone knows everybody else, it's no surprise that Meg and the driver, Cindy Ann Kreisler, were once the best of friends. Now, as Meg recovers from her own injuries, she and Rex find themselves unable to cope with their anger and despair, especially after Cindy Ann returns—with a mere slap on the wrist—to the life she lived before the accident: living in a beautiful house, enjoying her own three daughters, all of whom walked away from the accident unharmed.
Mornings, we woke with an ache in our throats, a sourness in our stomachs, that had nothing to do with Evan. The truth was that, with each passing month, he was harder to remember, harder to see. I felt as if I were grasping at the color of water, the color of the wind or the sky. And this only made me angrier. My mind returned, again and again, to Cindy Ann, to what she'd done. When I passed Evan's room, the closed door like a fist, I thought about how Cindy Ann had destroyed us. When I saw other people's children, I promised myself that someday, Cindy Ann would pay.
In their rage and grief, Meg and Rex buy a boat to sail around the world, hoping to put as much distance between themselves and Cindy Ann Kreisler as possible. Adrift in the company of otherlive-board cruisers, Meg tries to believe that she and Rex have left their bitterness behind. But when she returns to Fox Harbor for her older brother's wedding, she is forced to face the complex ties that bind her to the woman who has wounded her so badly. For, as Meg knows better than anyone, Cindy Ann has secrets and sorrows of her own, dating back to the summer of their friendship.
Impassioned, insightful, and beautifully written, Blue Water is the story of people learning to face the unthinkable—a compelling affirmation of the human potential for forgiveness, redemption, and grace. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1964
• Where—Lapeer, Michigan, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Cornell University
• Awards—Nelson Algren Prize, 1992; Pushcart Prize, 1994;
Friends of American Writers Prize, 1995
• Currently—Port Washington, Wisconsin; New York City
A. Manette Ansay’s first novel, Vinegar Hill, established the writer as a novelist who could tell a difficult story with great grace. Born in Michigan in 1964 and raised in Port Washington, Wisconsin among a huge Roman Catholic extended family, Ansay infuses her fiction with the reality of Midwestern farm life, the constraints of Roman Catholicism, and the toll the combination can take on women and men alike.
Philosophical and cerebral, with a gift for identifying the telling domestic detail and conveying it in a fresh way, Ansay incorporates the rhythm of rural Midwestern life—the polka dance at a wedding reception, the bowling alley, community suppers, gossip, passion, and betrayal—into novels that illuminate the most difficult aspects of maintaining any close relationship, whether it be familial or not. In Vinegar Hill, Ansay examines the forces that hold a Catholic woman in the 1970s hostage to her emotionally abusive marriage. In Midnight Champagne, set at a wedding, she focuses her lens on the institution of marriage itself; the story is told through the shifting points of view of the couples who attend the event.
Readers and critics alike have testified to her talents: The New Yorker said of Vinegar Hill, “This world is lit by the measured beauty of her prose, and the final line is worth the pain it takes to get there.” The novel was selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 1999; Ansay’s following book, Midnight Champagne, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Like Flannery O’Connor, whom Ansay cites as an influence, Ansay is concerned with moments of grace in which the truth suddenly manifests itself with life-changing intensity. In the wrong hands, her material could be the stuff of soap operas. But Ansay strives for emotional complexity rather than mere bathos, and addresses both suffering and joy with intelligence and sensitivity.
Ansay’s life has been as complex and fascinating as the dramas that unfold in her novels. A gifted pianist as a child, she studied at the University of Wisconsin while still a high school student. Later, while a student at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, she was afflicted by a disease that devastated her neurological system, cutting short her dreams of becoming a concert pianist, and leaving her confined for years to a wheelchair. She had never written fiction before, but turned her disciplined ear and mind to writing, promising herself to write two hours a day, three days a week, the same sort of disciplined schedule she had imposed on herself as a student musician.
Limbo, Ansay’s story of her struggle with illness, is as evocatively written as her novels. Ansay never descends into sentimentality, but instead confronts her medical problems – and the limitations they impose—unflinchingly, describing both the indignities that disabled people face daily, as well as how her own illness has become a personal test of faith.
Extras
From a 2001 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Ansay was still looking for the appropriate title for her first novel when, on the way to a meeting with her MFA advisor near Cornell University, Ansay spotted a street sign with the answer. "I happened to glance up and see a street sign that said "Vinegar Hill." It was perfect," Ansay writes on her web site. "I had never turned onto that street before, and I made a point never to do so afterwards. I wanted it to belong solely to my characters. And it does."
• One scene in Midnight Champagne, the air-hockey table encounter, was written for a friend of Ansay's. She writes, "A friend of mine had been musing about sex and literature, and she said, 'Why is it that we so seldom read about the kind of sex we want to be having?' I said, 'What kind of sex is that?' She said, 'Fun sex.' I said, 'I'm writing a scene just for you."'
Her own words:
In my early 20s, my health rapidly deteriorated for reasons that are still unclear. At 19, I was a piano performance major at a nationally renowned conservatory; by 21, I was so weak I couldn't stand up long enough to take a shower. After spending a year under my parents' care, visiting specialist after specialist, my health improved to the point where I could return to my life—though a different one—with the help of a power wheelchair. Limbo is the story of learning to live within the physical and emotional limbo of an undiagnosed illness, an uncertain prognosis, an uncertain future. It is also the story of how the unraveling of one life can plant the seeds for another, and the ways in which illness has challenged—in ways not necessarily bad—my most fundamental assumptions about life and faith.
Growing up in rural Wisconsin, I was formed by a place where the roads met at right angles, a landscape in which cause and effect were visible for miles. I was raised to believe that every question had its single, uniform answer, and that that answer was inevitably God's will. But the human body, like the life it leads, is ultimately a mystery, and to live my life without restraint, to keep moving forward instead of looking back, I have had to let go of the need to understand why what has happened has happened. It is not that I believe the things that happen to us happen for a reason. I certainly don't believe that "things have a way of working out for the best," something I've been told countless times by well-meaning doctors, family members, and friends. But I do believe that we each have the ability to decide how we'll react to the random circumstances of our lives, and that our reactions can shape future circumstances, affect opportunities, open doors.
The writer Ann Patchett talks about awakening in the hospital after a terrible car wreck at the age of eight, and thinking, with absolute clarity: Now I can be anything, and I want to be a writer. I started writing on January 1, 1988, shortly after I began to realize that this new, altered body was mine to keep. Thirteen years and five books later, I continue to write as a way of making sense of a world that doesn't. I write to create the kind of closure that rarely exists in life. The best advice on writing I've ever heard is this: Try to write the kind of story you yourself most want to read. Limbo is that story." (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
In Ansay's latest, a probing character study, Meg Van Dorn and her husband, Rex, struggle with the loss of six-year-old son, Evan, in a crash with Cindy Ann Kreisler-Meg's best friend from high school and an alcoholic, who was drunk at the wheel. The two file a civil suit that would financially ruin the well-off Cindy Ann, but Meg has a change of heart, given the impending marriage of Meg's older brother to Cindy Ann's sister; it's more a contrived plot device than a genuine narrative event, but it does force Meg to constantly shift her perspective on the tragedy, especially as Ansay offers a sympathetic sketch of Cindy Ann and her troubled past. Most of Meg's emotional cycling takes place on the Atlantic coast, where she and Rex have gone sailing as a coping strategy and have fallen in with various strands of lower-end sailing culture: the book's best energy is spent in places like the Island Girls bar, to which Meg eventfully repairs one night without Rex. The resolution of Meg and Rex's marital issues seems glaringly underwritten in the final chapters, but on the whole, this is a solid and revelatory novel on themes of grief and loss.
Publishers Weekly
Ansay takes us on the dark, emotional journey of a mother's losing a child and brings us out on the other side into forgiveness and redemption. Meg and Rex Van Dorn's comfortable life in Meg's home town on the Wisconsin shore of Lake Michigan ends when their young son is killed in a car accident as Meg is driving him to school. Cindy Ann, the driver who caused the accident, was Meg's best friend in high school. Meg and Rex file a civil suit against Cindy but drop it when they find that bitterness is dominating their lives. Trying to start over, they buy a sailboat and move to the Caribbean. Their seafaring life, which Ansay depicts authentically in all its drudgery and danger, seems exotic but offers them little comfort. In time, Meg's feelings about Cindy evolve into something like a supernatural connection. When she learns that Rex is secretly pursuing the civil suit, the differences in how they cope with grief begin to pull their marriage apart. For all popular fiction collections; buy to please the many fans of Ansay's Oprah selection, Vinegar Hill. —Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
A soft-spoken, unenergetic narrative of grief, anger and forgiveness. Megan Van Dorn, nearing her 50s, has found fulfillment in late motherhood; life in her Midwestern suburb is good, and she even seems to enjoy spending hours in an ergonomic chair in an accounting office. Then tragedy strikes: Her bright, pleasant son is killed in an automobile accident. The offending driver is Megan's childhood friend Cindy Ann Kreisler, who, it seems, has a drinking problem but who manages to avoid a Breathalyzer test until a couple of hours after the crash, and even then "her blood alcohol level...was barely within Wisconsin's legal limit." In depicting all this, novelist and memoirist Ansay (Limbo, 2001, etc.) is matter-of-fact, at a seeming remove from her characters. When Cindy Ann is acquitted with a slap-on-the-wrist punishment, Megan finds herself "terrible in my anger: strong, and fierce, and righteous. I could have led an army"; yet the reader doesn't ever feel much of this anger, for Megan's narration is flat and without affect, and her discovery of "the sheer cathartic power of...rage" is evidenced mostly by the fact that she sets a lawyer loose on Cindy Ann while she and her near-perfect husband, Rex, fulfill his dream of setting sail to the Caribbean. A year passes, and Megan, who returns home from time to time to attend to household matters, finds her rage slowly dissipating at the sight of poor Cindy Ann, who has hit rock-bottom and seems not to know how to climb up again. What to do? Well, Rex has taken to hitting the bottle himself, and to his irritation, Megan acts on that sense of pity, all of which has-well, consequences. Effective at moments. But, for the most part, thetelling is long and the showing short; not much happens, and when it does, it seldom moves.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Based on her demeanor at the scene of the accident and her behavior throughout Blue Water, how would you describe Cindy Ann Kreisler, the woman responsible for Evan Van Dorn’s death?
2. What role does the small-town atmosphere of Fox Harbor play in Rex and Meg Van Dorn’s decision to seek time at sea on their sailboat, the Chelone?
3. What aspects of life on the Chelone draw Rex and Meg closer together, and what aspects push them further apart?
4. How does Toby’s relationship with Mallory Donaldson, Cindy Ann Kreisler’s sister, complicate the Van Dorns’ decision to seek legal damages from Cindy Ann?
5. How does Cindy Ann’s sexual abuse by her stepfather, Dan Kolb, impact Meg’s feelings about her son’s killer?
6. In what ways does Meg’s budding friendship with Bernadette Hale and her invalid son, Leon, transform her feelings about seeking revenge and granting forgiveness?
7. To what extent is Evan’s accidental death the cause of the deterioration of Rex and Meg’s marriage?
8. What explains Meg’s decision to befriend Cindy Ann Kreisler on her return to Fox Harbor, and how does this decision impact her relationship with Rex?
9. How would you describe Meg and Rex’s methods of grieving over the course of Blue Water?
10. At the end of the novel, what does the birth of Toby and Mallory’s daughter, Sadie, represent to Meg?
(Questions from author's website.)
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