We Live in Water by Jess Walter

Published by Harper Perennial on February 12, 2013

Jess Walter's stories make me think of Donald Ray Pollock mixed with a dash of George Saunders. Many of Walter's Spokane-based characters are on the fringes of society. Walter writes about a homeless philosopher-beggar who, on good days, spends his money on a book instead of booze and asks his group counselor why he can't talk about his ideas instead of all of the stupid things he's done. He writes about an inmate who, released on a temporary pass to get dialysis, would rather go fishing. He writes about a tweaker who must choose between food and drugs.

Yet when Walter writes of these broken lives, he does so with such sensitivity that it's impossible not to identify with the characters -- with what they feel, if not with how they live. As one of his characters says, "Who isn't crazy sometimes?" His characters may be more extreme than most, but their unchecked behavior sheds light on thoughts and feelings that are buried within us all.

In a couple of stories, the narrator is living a conventional woe-filled life (divorce, career failure) but the story's focus is on a character from the fringe. The narrator of the title story (one of my favorites in the collection) has problems, but the largest of them is the hole in his life left by the father he doesn't remember, the father who left his son in a car when he inside a building to deal with a trifecta of trouble. Another story begins with the sentence "I'm on my way to Vegas with my friend, Bobby Rausch, to save his stepsister from a life of prostitution." In that story, a character's life is clearly headed for disaster, but it isn't the unfortunate stepsister.

Some stories are about relatively functional people who are a little off. A young man, ill-equipped for fatherhood but with high hopes for his three children, becomes obsessed with discovering which one is stealing from the coin jar that constitutes the family's meager vacation fund. A day trader sentenced to community service teaches algebra to high school kids and reads the same story to the same grade schooler every day. A stalker's job as a newspaper editor puts him in a position to mess with his ex-girlfriend's horoscope.

Sometimes Walter writes about people who do the right thing, like the mechanic who refuses to rip off an old lady. On the other hand, one of my favorite stories, a work of small genius, teaches that you never really know who you can trust.

"Don't Eat Cat" is a departure, a humorous take on zombie stories -- after the borders are closed, the fast food/finance industry has to rely on zombies to fill service jobs -- although it is, in the end, a tragicomedy. (It isn't the only departure ... the story about saving the stepsister from life as a prostitute is pretty funny, another instance of humor in a serious vein.)

Although the stories expose the rawness of life, they also expose the humanity that is common to us all. Not many writers can perform that balancing act with the deftness Walter displays in this collection.

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