The weight of water - Anita Shreve [107]
I now live in New England in an old house of my own. It has sloping floors, cracked ceilings, no bathroom big enough in which to take an actual bath. It is always dirty in the way of old houses and hard to keep tidy. Sometimes I feel awash in newspapers, plastic toys, and milk cartons I think I am recycling. But occasionally, when we have a fire in the kitchen hearth, I imagine those who have been there before me. The baby who was born in the tiny room adjacent to the kitchen, the woman who cried have been there before me. The bay who was born in the tiny room adjacent to the kitchen, the woman who cried at the inattentions of her husband in the upstairs bedroom, the teenage girl who died of diphtheria in what is now my son’s room. It is a house, a place, that, however inconvenient, evokes a shared history, a history no farther away than across my kitchen table — a history of dresses falling, accounts rendered, ashes and plastic toys swept from the floor. It is a place full of stories.
Alice Walker once said in an interview with Charlie Rose that she was visited by her characters. I cannot lay claim to such visitations, but I have been graced by places. They — and the people who went before me — continue to feed my imagination, and it is a gift, like the Winship, for which I am enormously grateful.
Reading Group Questions
and Topics for Discussion
1. What are the similarities between Jean and Maren? In what ways are they different?
2. The Weight of Water is both a love story and a whodunit. Who do you think really killed Anethe and Karen? What evidence is there to support Louis Wagner’s innocence or guilt?
3. Atmosphere — the terribly rough climate and unbearably close living quarters — plays a significant role in the characters’ psychological states. To what extent are these external conditions responsible for the events of the novel?
4. “No one can know a story’s precise reality,” Jean points out (page 117). Discuss the significance of this statement as it applies to Jean’s reading of Maren’s journal. Should she — should we — believe Maren’s document as truth? To what extent does Jean fill in the blanks of Maren’s story to explain her own life? Do you think Jean maintains enough objectivity to write a fair account of the murders?
5. The Weight of Water is concerned with the subject of jealousy and its consequences. Discuss this theme as it emerges in the exchanges between Jean and Maren and their families. Do you believe that Adeline and Thomas were having an affair?
6. Maren and Evan have a very close sibling relationship. What events from their childhood fostered this attachment? Is there evidence that their relationship goes beyond that of brother and sister? How does Anethe’s arrival on the scene affect this relationship?
7. Jean ponders, “What moment was it that I might have altered? What point in time was it that I might have moved one way instead of another, had one thought instead of another?” (page 192). Are there moments in which Jean could have acted differently and thereby changed the course of the events that followed? If so, identify them. How much control do Jean and Maren have over their respective fates? How much does anyone?
8. It is often small resentments and indiscretions that lead to greater misdeeds. What small offenses do Jean and Maren commit? Do you feel these acts should be taken into account when determining their culpability for greater crimes?
9. How does the structure of the story — the weaving together of Maren’s story with Jean’s — underscore the novel’s theme? Have you ever been so influenced by an event in the past that it changed your present or your future?
10. Jean’s story begins with a plea for absolution: “I have to let this story go. It is with me all the time now, a terrible weight.” Similarly, Maren’s document opens with an appeal for vindication: “If it so please the Lord, I shall, with my soul and heart and sound mind, write the true and actual tale