What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us by Laura van den Berg (review)

150 BOOK NOTES What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, by Laura van den Berg Dzanc Books, 2009 reviewed by Joseph Holt The eight stories in Laura van den Berg’s debut fiction collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, transport their reader from northern California to Boston, from Manhattan to Scotland, Chicago, the Congo, Paris and Marseilles, and finally Madagascar. Lurking in the background are mythical beasts: sea monsters, swamp demons, sasquatches. The landscapes are dense, the scenery lush. Through all the various settings and supporting details, van den Berg’s young women protagonists find themselves adrift in the complications of adulthood. Due to recent losses, these women encounter a world in which all mystery has vanished. They lack direction and, sometimes , inspiration. “I can’t understand what I’m doing with my life,” confesses one. “I don’t remember my dreams,” says another , adding, “I can’t get them to stay with me.” Mystery, then, comes in the form of cryptozoology, the study of or search for mythical animals: Bigfoot, Nessie, and other regional legends. Characters—always secondary characters—obsess over these unseen monsters, dive below the surface in submarines and fly to remote jungles in their pursuit. Always they come up empty. The world-weary young women, however, so consumed by their own grief, act only as spectators to these cryptozoological obsessions . For all the various exotic locales and legends in What the World, the circumstances of each woman’s grief vary only slightly from one story to the next. Relationships have fizzled, parents have unexpectedly died, affairs are about to dead-end. 151 Book Notes As the collection progresses, these traumas unfortunately come to seem interchangeable. This is not to disparage weight in fiction . But the traumatic losses are often described in backstory, as if justifying the protagonists’ collective waywardness. The scenes are set, then, for these grief-stricken women to define themselves through their resolve—“to set about repairing my own life,” as the narrator says in “Inverness.” In “We Are Calling to Offer You a Fabulous Life,” Joyce carries on a doomed affair with her employer at a tribal art boutique. Darnel, a married man with a pregnant wife, hints that soon he and Joyce could vacation to Bali under the guise of a business trip. Instilled with hope, Joyce goes to buy herself a Balinese tropical fish, but settles instead for a simple goldfish she names “Bali.” When Darnel eventually breaks off the affair, Joyce steals an eight-hundred-dollar Balinese death mask from the boutique. Returning home, she is confronted by a would-be mugger: [The mugger] pushed his hand forward, so she could see the outline of the gun even more clearly. “Last chance,” he said. It was then Joyce started to laugh. . . . Bali kept coming into her mind. Bali! How could she have possibly believed Darnel would take her to someplace like Bali? It was all so ridiculous, and she kept going. Kept laughing, that is. But like most the women in What the World, she also keeps plunging into the endless grief stretched out before her, her fate already sealed. It is rare, however, for these women to engage in such bad behavior as theft and retaliation. Instead, rendered incapacitated by their grief, they go to work, carry on civilized conversations, write letters they never send. More than anything else, they think. They reflect. In “Still Life with Poppies,” the protagonist, Juliana, is described in a manner applying to all the women of What the World: “more than anything, she was incapable of deciding, of striking in a different, unknown direction.” If these stories encounter a common problem, it’s that emotional paralysis renders the characters incapable of change, colorado review 152 makes them static. Van den Berg’s women protagonists are mannered to the point of being dispassionate, but passion isn’t something to be avoided in fiction. Passionate characters take action, which leads to challenges, errors, consequences. Action —not past trauma—is how characters are defined. The women in What the World encounter few changes because they take few risks. They inhabit wildly exotic landscapes, but...