Open Water
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In Open Water, Maria Flook explores the charged and eerie shoreline of Newport, Rhode Island, where Willis Pratt squanders his days running small cons. But his heart’s not in it—he’s obsessed with fishing boat tragedies from his childhood and with Holly, a pretty new neighbor who is charged with arson.
Their romance is interrupted when Willis is called home to care for his dying step-mother, Rennie, whose biological son wants to place her in a care facility. Willis is determined to guarantee his stepmother the death she desires, but when he arrives, Rennie sees that it is he who needs caring for—Willis quickly gets hooked on her prescription morphine.
This is Maria Flook’s natural ground, a harsh and sensual terrain where family debt and carnal knowledge intersect. A fierce wit and an unrelenting vision earned her first novel, Family Night, a Special Citation from the PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation, and the New York Times praised it for “a spare, subtle, ethereal, and erotic style,” calling her gifts “extravagant and apparent on every page.”
Open Water is a ringing confirmation of Maria Flook’s remarkable talent. Caught up in the novel’s unremitting current, its characters are propelled to a resolution that no one left on shore could have imagined.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although it deals with pain and dying, this absorbing new novel by Flook (Reckless Wedding), with its three bedeviled protagonists, proves full of verve. Deliciously oddball Rennie Hopkins, a wraith with white hair flying, stockpiles a candy store's worth of high-tech painkillers to ease her cancer agony. Soon she's sharing pills and suppositories with her trouble-prone stepson, Willis Pratt. Just discharged from the Navy as psychologically unfit, Willis has arrived home with a broken wrist (which gets excruciatingly rebroken). Then newly divorced Holly Temple, on probation for having set fire to her unfaithful husband's bed, moves in next door, trying to patch together her shattered life. With a natural affinity for one another, Willis and Holly soon become lovers; both hover around Rennie. Meanwhile, Willis and his goofy buddy Fritz engage in bizarre criminal deals (such as delivering rare exotic birds to a ``smut king'') in order to build up a fund for Rennie to ensure that she can stay in her house by the sea (her smarmy son, Munro, is trying to hustle her into a home for the terminally ill). Setting the novel in Newport, R.I., Flook incorporates the sea as a potent presence, using boating and fishing as significant scene and plot elements to steer her story gracefully and with humor to its satisfying conclusion.
