Reconstruction 6.3 (Summer 2006)
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Robinson, Roxana. Sweetwater. New York: Random House, 2003. Paperback. US$13.95. 319 pages.
<1> When Huck lights out for the territories at the end of his hopeless float down the river with Jim, it's already clear that his escape will solve nothing. The story he will become part of in the West is already one of multiple displacements moving fast toward the environmental catastrophe of the dust bowl. Yet long before the frontier was "closed," it inspired myths that would prove to be more persistent than its reality. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the West still represents the pure possibility to remake identity and to leave behind the corruption of Huck's "sivilization" or Edward Abbey's "siphilization." The myths of Western escape and remaking have long functioned to deliver characters from crisis and failure into something different. The real drama lies in whether the difference is truly new or only an altered setting for the same old story.
<2> And so it may be that our most mature and insightful accounts of people's relationship to places are those that confront what a grown-up Huck might soon discover in the territories—that we have run out of space, that there's nowhere to run that our social and environmental problems won't follow us or even precede us. Writers have come to these insights spurred in part by the web of relationships articulated by ecologists and environmental historians. William Cronon, in particular, has critiqued narratives of escape by arguing that even the woods and the wilderness are ideas we've constructed, and that to think of an uninhabited, pure wilderness set against the threatening city is to indulge in a dualistic illusion that we can flee from history and from the consequences of our actions. Cronon writes, "to the extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead" (81). Yet the myths of elbow room and natural refuge are powerful, and the evasion continues as we so easily fall into dividing the world into East and West, City and Wilderness, Culture and Nature.
<3> All of this is to say that Roxana Robinson's novel Sweetwater deals with some of the most compelling questions that confront us as we hear from all corners that internal and external landscapes correspond, that mental health and environmental health might have something to do with each other, that cities and wildernesses are more interdependent than we suspected. Place is more than setting in this novel; it is essential to revealing characters' motivations and to understanding the questions the novel leaves us with. The family drama, for which Robinson is well known, takes on an added resonance as the fragility of both the natural and social worlds finds expression in the dynamic between water and growth, drought and flame.
<4> Isabel Green, the central figure of this character study, knows natural processes. A specialist in effluent contamination, her imagination is seized by water, "its physical presence—limpid and protean. . . . its transparency, its lucidity, its radiance" (22). Isabel is touched by the capacity for stream water in a natural system to purify itself, "carrying off waste from its banks by seasonal floods and disposing of it through swarming voracious microorganisms, plants, crayfish, shellfish" (22). Readers come to understand even more than Isabel that what she loves about water is what she needs for herself. Water courses through this novel like it does through the human body; it is essential to its form and weight, yet it's not often visible.
<5> When Isabel arrives from the city to Sweetwater, the Adirondack retreat that has been in her new husband's family for generations, we come to find out that Isabel's knowledge of nature is rather abstract, from books and classes more than experience. She can explain the hydrological system, but she has never canoed or skinny-dipped. Isabel knows the patterns, but not the names of trees or ferns. This sort of dissociation from her own life, the distance between her ideas and her reality, makes Isabel a compelling figure as she swims toward the surface of her present. And in this age of extinction and contamination, her abstractions are those that weigh on all of us: she "felt as if all these losses were spreading across the planet like darkness and sorrow, and the thought was too heavy for her to hold, too terrifying to confront" (227).
<6> Having entered her second marriage to Paul in an attempt to move on from the guilt and tragedy of her first, Isabel observes her surroundings, the play of light on the lake, the feel of the air as the day warms, the soft soil lined with roots along the path to the cabin. She pays careful attention to the flow of tension and resentment among her new in-laws, and it is as if the beauty of the Adirondacks pulls Isabel toward increasing awareness of herself and honesty about those around her. As an attraction arises between Isabel and Paul's brother Whitney—a comfortably masculine conservation biologist from Wyoming—the novel is saved from soap-operatics by Robinson's exquisite skill in sentences and her subtle insight into characters who tend to hide their deepest truths from themselves and their loved ones. When the family talks about the drought and the forest fires in the region, readers begin to see how in old families and climax forests conflagrations don't just happen all at once; fuel accumulates for decades as it waits for a spark.
<7> Readers might easily form the impression that the Adirondacks are the setting of Sweetwater, for that is where the present of the novel takes place. Yet the book's sections alternate between the present of the lake and Isabel's past in New York City and London. Fully half the book takes place in the city, though not even Robinson mentions this in her afterward on the novel's setting. That there is so little dialogue between the city and not-city reveals a great deal about Isabel's inability to integrate the facets of her life and perhaps something as well about the difficulty of our longstanding uneasiness with relationships between cities and wildernesses in both fiction and reality.
<8> Although the character never quite grasps the relationships manifesting between her life's various environments, the author herself is clearly interested in putting it all together. On January 1, 2006, Robinson published an op-ed piece that begins by looking back from the future to ask why we—all of us—failed to act upon all the information that made environmental crisis apparent. Returning to the present, she recites the now familiar litany of species extinction and concludes, "We're interconnected to everything. The scrawniest weed in Patagonia absorbs carbon dioxide, which poisons us, and produces oxygen, which we breathe in New York or Houston. Plants provide air, food, and medicine; every living being occupies a niche in the global mosaic."
<9> Such information and ideas pull us away from dichotomies between the natural and the cultural. It's the kind of thinking that should wake us up. But whether the source is Robinson in a newspaper or Al Gore on a high-low with impressive charts in a movie, we tend to nod our heads and go on with life. We've heard it all before. We've felt that powerless before. Readers might respond similarly when Robinson's character presses her in-laws and readers with the dull weight of scientific consensus. Isabel's environmentalist speeches, and those of other characters, are not the liveliest portions of the novel. But since it is a novel, the speeches are part of a story, a way for readers to chart the emotional weather. And stories can help. Along with good science with its rafts of data informing us that everything's connected, we also need to see characters struggling to make real the connections among many streams of their lives and the world around them. We need to see how these characters' blind spots and partial successes are our own. As Isabel struggles to integrate her internal and external landscapes, readers are in a position to see her searching for a perspective in which personal contentment weds collective responsibility.
<10> But fuel has been building in the novel as it has in the Adirondack woods around the family retreat. When everything goes up in smoke, it's not at all clear that the fire will be refining or the water purifying. Isabel and others have done enough speechifying on environmental issues over drinks for readers to be informed that a hundred years of fire prevention can set the stage for catastrophe. Yet as the characters, or almost all of them, retreat to the water as the flames close in, the mountain lion swimming alongside their canoes suggests evidence of a rewilding underway. The lodge will burn. The property will be turned over to the state to become part of the wilderness that surrounds it. The people have been expelled from the wilderness, and the idea of a separation between culture and nature seems reinforced, if anything. As Isabel and the others paddle away from the physical and emotional conflagration, one wonders whether the water represents something restorative or whether it merely carries her away. If Isabel achieves a new self-awareness, is it only by lighting out for the territories? What would it mean to make a home and stick, to work out the dilemmas of how to relate to the natural world that permeates urban and rural lives? Will insecurities and abstraction follow her west from the New York wilderness to which she fled from the city? She's been there before.
Works Cited
Cronon, William. "The Trouble with Wilderness." Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. 69-90.
Robinson, Roxana. "Watching as the World Vanishes." The Boston Globe. 1 Jan. 2006. Online (click title).
Bradley John Monsma
California State University, Channel Islands