Black Water Rising
Attica Locke
Harper Perennial, 2009
U.S. mass market paperback, reprint
ISBN 978-0061735868
448 pages; $14.99

Black Water Rising, nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author, is well-written, more assured than most first novels. The prose is smooth and the dialogue solid, perhaps an indication of Attica Locke’s experience as a screenwriter. But this experience did not save Locke from a somewhat surprising problem: Black Water Rising has pacing problems that make it drag badly. Locke seems to have been so interested in telling a story about the civil rights movement in Houston in the early 1980s – one to which her family apparently has connections – that she overplotted the book, trying to fit in too many details, too many subplots, too many digressions. The subject matter is inherently interesting, especially in the hands of a black woman writing a generation later; each subplot is unusual and interesting in and of itself. But the tangle created by all these threads is not sufficiently untangled by the end of the book, and worse, the reader doesn’t much care by that point because character has been is sacrificed to elucidation. We’re supposed to root for the protagonist, Jay Porter, to come out on top, but he’s a hard fellow to give a damn about. Thus, while the novel starts out promisingly, the novel as a whole is seriously flawed.

Jay Porter is an African-American in Houston in 1981. He practices law without a great deal of success, representing plaintiffs in personal injury cases that have little value. Jay lives with his wife, Bernie, who is heavily pregnant with their first child. On a hot, humid night, Jay takes Bernie out for her birthday, though the celebration is far from lavish; a client has offered his decrepit barge for a cruise on the bayou. Bernie’s sister has helped prepare the barge, decorating and providing within Jay’s means: “Inside the cabin there are balloons instead of flowers, hot links and brisket instead of filet, and a cooler of beer and grape Shasta instead of wine.” But Bernie is happy, because this represents quite a bit of fuss, and that’s what she really wants. So the couple is headed for a decent night out.

But events conspire against them. As they’re floating along, they hear a woman call out for help, followed by gunshots and a splash. Jay, reluctant to get involved, is persuaded by Bernie – shamed might be a better word – to jump to the rescue. He fishes a woman out of the water, but she refuses to tell them anything about what happened, insisting instead that they simply drop her at the police station.

Although Jay hopes that he has seen the end of it with this tidy rescue, it quickly becomes apparent that things will not resolve themselves this easily. Jay learns that a man’s body has been discovered in a car very close to the spot where Jay rescued the woman from the water. And before too long, Jay is pressured to keep his mouth shut about what he knows. He’d have been content to do that in the first place, but once the threats and the bribes start, he no longer feels safe in ignoring the situation. As time goes on, the rescue starts to have all sorts of consequences for a dockworkers’ strike, an oil company’s future, Houston’s economy and the political viability of Houston’s mayor, who just happens to be an old – and white – girlfriend of Jay’s, who may or may not have ratted him out to federal agents in his not-nearly-distant-enough past.

So much gets piled on this single event that the plots and subplots start to teeter. At the same time, we’re dealing with Bernie’s pregnancy, Jay’s lost gun, a personal injury case involving a lawyer who might be crooked, Houston politics, civil rights, racial violence, union politics, oil stored in old salt mines, high gas prices – it’s just too much to keep track of, or for Locke to ultimately resolve well. Some subplots peter out to almost nothing, others are never satisfactorily played out, and it becomes impossible to tie everything together into one lovely knot.

Locke has enough plot in this one novel to fuel at least two others as well. It is not exactly unknown for a first time novelist to be a bit too ambitious, but it’s rather a shame that an editor didn’t point out to this writer that the novel becomes too knotted, or that none of her characters is particularly likable or even fully fleshed out. I won’t say that the nomination of this novel as one of the best first novels of the year is a mystery; it is too competent in its use of language to be undeserving, and the subject matter is too historically important to be ignored. Still, I hope Locke puts her obvious writing skills to the service of a tighter plot next time around.