LEWIS ROBINSON'S WATER DOGS: A "MUST-READ"

A few weeks ago I paid a second visit to Newtonville Books (see my earlier post below), drawn there this time by a reading featuring Maine-based fiction writer Lewis Robinson. I first encountered Robinson’s work 6 years ago in the form of a short story, “Officer Friendly,” published in the top-shelf literary journal Tin House. I admired that story so much (actually, I was so envious of it) that I read it aloud in its entirety to my Intro to Creative Writing class as an example of how a tale of adolescent misadventure could transcend its anecdotal simplicity to become a serious and fully-realized work of literature.

I knew that “Officer Friendly” became the title story of Robinson’s first collection of stories, but I didn’t get my hands on that book until the night of his reading in Newtonville. Then I devoured it in less than a next week—at the busy start of a new semester, no less. It’s a really fine gathering of short fiction, and while “Officer Friendly” remains my favorite story by far (I’m still envious!), I was also particularly taken with “Puckheads” and “Finches.”

But Robinson’s main reason for being at Newtonville Books was to promote his first novel—the hot-off-the-press Water Dogs. I expected that I would have to wait a while before even dipping into it. Well, I did wait a couple of weeks . . . but once I picked it up, I didn’t want to put it down (though I had to, occasionally): it is truly one of the most satisfying and gratifying novels I have a read in a long, long time. Part of the satisfaction and gratification involves the pleasure of discovery: although the novel was reviewed very positively in the New York Times Book Review a month or so ago (to avoid the “spoiler effect,” I just glanced at the review), the book still feels “unheralded”—a “gem” just waiting to be unearthed by the lucky reader looking for a new and interesting literary voice.

Not wanting to create a spoiler effect myself, I won’t give away many details about the entanglements of the indelibly etched Littlefield family who are at the center of the narrative—Bennie, his brother William (known mostly by the family surname), their sister Gwen, their semi-detached mother Eleanor, and their father known even by his children as Coach. All I’ll say is that the novel is utterly evocative of the area known as midcoast Maine: the landscape, the characters, and the plot all seem so organically intertwined that it could hardly be set anywhere else. There are some wonderful comic moments, some wonderful poignant moments, and some really sobering moments as well. There are moments of violence and moments of tenderness. But through all the twists and turns of emotional intensity and suspenseful plot, there is a remarkable consistency in the quality of the writing: there is not a false or faulty sentence, paragraph or chapter in the entire book. (And this showed during Robinson’s reading at Newtonville Books—the novel unfolds altogether naturally, as if in the voice of a man speaking . . .)

I know that it’s still relatively early in 2009. But I’ll be hard-pressed to find another book this year that pleases me as much as Water Dogs. I can’t recommend it highly enough.