"The House of Deep Water," by Jeni McFarland

I admit I was first drawn to “The House of Deep Water” (Putnam, 2020), the debut novel by Jeni McFarland, because it is set in Michigan, where I lived for some years as a high school and college student (many years ago!), and where I continued to visit family and friends for many years after. (I have posted here about going to my late parents’ Michigan lake cottage many summers even long after I had moved to California, and the joys of choosing the books to take for the plane and for reading by the lakeside.) The setting of this novel, in a small town near Kalamazoo, is not anywhere I had lived, but I had been to Kalamazoo and knew people from that area. And there are a few references to Michigan life. But as it turns out, this aspect is not emphasized in the book. Of interest, though, are the social class aspects of the story; social class is a topic I have addressed in my academic research and writing. The small town where the story is set, River Bend, is mostly working class, with residents struggling to get and keep jobs and to make enough money to survive. Within that context, the main focus of the novel is on the complicated relationships among various members of two extended, multi-generational families. One family is white and one is mostly black. But race is only a minor focus. The novel is about the tangles and the troubled yet supportive interconnections among the members of the families. The spine of the story is the return to River Bend by three women family members who were eager to leave the town some years ago, but who are now, separately, either drawn or driven back by their current life circumstances. We learn to know three generations of each of the two main families mentioned above. I was very grateful for the family tree chart at the beginning of the book, and I referred back to it many times while reading. The characters are vividly portrayed. Everyone knows everyone else’s business; even the secrets are often not very secret. The characters are all complex, with various perspectives and quirks; the author isn’t afraid to show some of the characters in a bad light, and yet shows their redeeming qualities as well. There is a fair amount of infidelity within their small circles, and some competition for the attention of one of the characters, Steve, which even the author is puzzled by, as he is unprepossessing (except in a sort of smarmy way), dishonest, often drunk, and completely unreliable. A lot of plot happens; there is constant moving back and forth between the present and the past. In fact, the past is always present in these characters’ lives.