Review of: The
Seduction of Water
Author: Carol Goodman
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Source: Dallas Library
book sale
Grade: B
Carol Goodman’s The Seduction
of Water contains all the elements that would become characteristic of her adult
fiction. There’s a 30-something woman academic, a beautiful building haunted by
its history, a mysterious manuscript, and violent death. Oh, and a love
triangle and a gripping climax, lapped in Goodman’s seductively lovely prose. And
of course, there are bodies of water. Lots of water, whose seductive and
dangerous powers the 2003 novel’s title refers to. I haven’t read her entire oeuvre, which now includes young adult
fiction, but I suspect Goodman would never be able to write a story set in a
desert.
The Seduction of Water
opens with the telling of a fantasy tale by the narrator’s mother, a once-bestselling
author killed in a fire in a tawdry hotel, where she was registered as the wife
of a man other than her daughter’s father. (Goodman’s ability to shift
seamlessly between the tragedies of the past to the harrowing present is one of
her many gifts.)
The story that opens the book is the last one the narrator,
Iris Greenfeder, then 10-years-old, ever heard from her mother. Supposedly on
her way to a literary conference, the mother, Kay Greenfeder, nee Morrissey,
took an unexplained detour. It led her from the elegant 19th century
watering place in upstate New York where she, her daughter, and her hotel
manager husband lived to the hot-sheets dive in a dangerous Coney Island
neighborhood. It was a detour that would lead to her death, and to the betrayal
of everything her daughter and husband believed about her.
Why did Kay desert the family she loved? Who was the man
listed on the Coney Island hotel’s register, a man whose body was never found?
And where is the missing manuscript Kay spent the last year of her life
writing, the manuscript that might explain the strange turns of her life, and
of her death?
Twenty years into the present, the questions still haunt her
daughter Iris.
Her mother wasn’t able to finish her final manuscript, and
Iris hasn’t been able to complete anything else in her own life. Not her PhD
dissertation, not marriage to her decade-long boyfriend. Not even a career. Her
literary works, at best, have only been published in obscure (and mostly
defunct) magazine. Her three part-time teaching jobs barely cover the rent on
her one-room apartment in New York City, eked out by a stipend sent by her
aunt, who still works at the upstate hotel Iris’s late father once managed.
And even that stipend is in danger as Iris learns that the
elegant old hostelry is up for sale.
It’s with some foreboding that Iris assigns her students the
task of writing a story based on their favorite fairy tale. Little does she
know the assignment will reopen an investigation into her mother’s life. And as
she follows the clues from her mother’s books, to the hotel of her childhood,
and through connections with a wealthy hotelier and art expert, her discoveries
open doors others are willing to kill to keep closed.
I love Goodman’s writing, but as her heroine’s search
continues, The Seduction of Water takes
on an overstuffed feeling. Suspense fiction isn’t to be mistaken, but this one
has too many coincidences, too many characters, many strange plot twists crammed
into the final chapters to be entirely digestible.
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