cover image Waterline

Waterline

Ross Raisin. Harper Perennial, $14.99 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-0-06-210397-0

Raisin’s (Out Backward) second novel is a powerful depiction of the dislocating effects of grief. Glasgow shipyard worker Mick Little is unmoored when his beloved wife, Cathy, dies of cancer. Blamed by his son for her death, Mick withdraws and slides into despondency and drink. Unable to bear the pitying stares of his friends or the memories of home, he moves to London, but finds few opportunities and little to distract him from his sorrows and submits to a dissolution scarcely imaginable. Raisin’s novel, written in a sometimes inscrutable brogue, does not unfold easily. The Beckettian repetition of mourning, numbness, and self-destruction mimics Mick’s disorientation and growing dysfunction. But the persistent reader will find his tragic fall and ultimate salvation genuinely moving. Mick is finely rendered as a man alienated by his love and guilt; his downward spiral feels painfully real. Raisin is as likely to linger on a moment of idleness as on Mick’s inchoate fury, capturing the cadences of depression and rage. The novel argues for patience and empathy in the face of self-inflicted ruin, even as Mick and his family struggle to find it for themselves. Agent: Rogers, Coleridge & White. (Feb.)