The Water Cure by Percival Everett (review)

2 1 6 W E S T E R N A M E R IC A N L ITE R A T U R E S u m m e r 2 0 0 8 and their virtue intact, the young women bought two Model Ts, packed them full of supplies, and headed out. Marie’s granddaughter, Joanne Wilke, captures the heart of that journey in her book, Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West. With the exception of a few hours of driving lessons, the women learned everything about Model Ts on the road, usually from fellow travelers who were amused or entranced by the two carloads of women. They approached treacher­ ous roads, bad brakes, and blown tires with overall calm (occasionally punctured by shrieking panic), confident that they would find a way out of any situation. The West had been laid wide open, and travelers were eager to share the rugged trip. The optimism of the time shone in their many letters, and the generosity of strangers was as prominent as the natural wonders they toured. The women spent two full months living out in the elements and feeling completely at home. Marie’s wanderlust was genetic; her family tree refuses to put down geographical roots. Her journey through the West is neither the first nor the last audacious expedition in her family. The wandering of one generation inspired the same hunger in the next, and Wilke found it impossible to tell the stories of one woman without including them all. Four generations of women confronted their own frontiers, the dark lines that bounded their safe existences; some strode across them while others built walls against them. The geography shifted from east to west and back again, but the need for the journey was constant. Through interviews, journals, letters, and pictures, Wilke reclaims a nar­ rative that had been lost even to its participants, whose memories had slipped and faded in the sixty years since their trip. She set out to capture the expedi­ tion of a lifetime and instead captured the journey of several lifetimes, includ­ ing her own. The women all found the trip to be well worth taking, and Wilke’s readers will feel the same. The Water Cure. By Percival Everett. Saint Paul, M N: Graywolf Press, 2007. 216 pages, $22.00. Reviewed by Brian Yost Texas Tech University, Lubbock The Water Cure, like many of Percival Everett’s other books, demonstrates his exceptional creativity and expansive knowledge of philosophy. The novel is composed of hundreds of short fragments of interconnected narrative, com­ mentary on classical Greek rhetoric and philosophy, and sketches paying homage to the punning style of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) (“I will exhighbit esnuff off myshelf, my deep sadnest asidle, my disillusionmantle adder”), in what Everett presents as the journal of Ishmael Kidder, a man seemingly falling to pieces following the kidnapping, rape, and murder of his eleven-year-old daughter while he imprisons and tortures a man he believes is probably responsible for his daughter’s death in the basement of his Taos B o o k R e v ie w s 2 1 7 cabin (16). The title of the novel refers to Kidder’s chosen method of torture, a practice consisting of duct-taping his victim to a board blindfolded and pour­ ing water over his head, a form of torture the nanator describes as extremely effective as it leaves no evidence. just as the marks of waterboarding are not physically enduring, Kidder focuses obsessively on the contingency and impermanence ofall things, whether the existence of his daughter, preserved only in memory, or his own personal identity, which coincides privately with that of his pseudonym, Estelle Gilliam, under whose name he publishes torrid romance novels. In each of these, Kidder finds the reality or existence of his object constructed solely through words and maintained through individuals’ willingness to adopt their interpretations. Dissatisfied with the legal recourse available, he points out that the court, like any ordinary reader, merely hears “elaborately detailed and messy stories” and passes judgment based upon an opinion that the testimony “is somehow more compelling ... and therefore more believable...