Looking Through Water: A Novel
“Keep an open mind and an open heart. It gets bad sometimes, but things will work out.”
The sometimes-strained relations between fathers and sons is the subject of Bob Rich’s debut novel Looking Through Water. Former Wall Street magnate William McKay takes his troubled grandson on a fishing trip, using the time to try to pass along wisdom hard gained. In the course of the day, William uses his own life experiences to illustrate the folly of shutting out an absentee father and to encourage the boy to see that the future isn’t as dark as it sometimes appears.
The bulk of William’s story revolves around a failed engagement and a fishing contest entered with his decade-missing father. Leo, who disappeared from the lives of Will and Will’s mother when she developed Alzheimer’s, contacts his estranged son out of the blue with an invitation to participate in a fishing contest in the Florida Keys. Having just publically threatened his fiancée’s lover with an antique dueling pistol and accidentally shooting himself with its mate, Will jumps at the chance to get out of New York City for a few days.
The book is in its element when dealing with the fishing trip itself. Rich clearly is familiar with fly fishing and open water fishing. His clear descriptions of the equipment used and techniques to catch trophy fish are worthy of a nonfiction guidebook to fishing the Keys.
Sections that deal with Will, Leo, and their guide, Cole, angling are exciting and evocative, particularly the sequence in which Will fights and lands (sort of) a prize tarpon. “Its large silver scales gleamed like radiant armor in the refracted sunlight,” Rich tells the reader. “It’s called bowing to the king.” Descriptions such as that raise the actual catch and release story to the level of a mythical battle.
The framing story of Will and his grandson, Kyle, however, is not so bright. Rather than allowing the reader to decipher the lessons Will learned from his trip (they aren’t difficult to read), Rich instead chooses to explain them. The framing story is full of telling (particularly in the first few pages, wherein the history of three generations of the McKay family is narrated in less than eight pages) versus showing, which leaves the narrative feeling flat at best and preachy at worst.
“Issues” are thrown in haphazardly: divorce, improbable love at first sight, domestic abuse, drug trafficking, infidelity, children born out of wedlock . . . the problem is that none of them are dealt with in enough depth to give them presence in the mind of the reader. They’re paraded out one after another, occasionally in almost Shakespearean monologues, but none of them are compelling; indeed, even the character to whom the monologue is addressed does little but give a literal or metaphoric nod before the story is off to another soap operatic problem.
The fishing sequences, though, those are glorious. Rich creates those stories with a relish that needs none of the moralizing he later gives to Will. Like Hemingway’s stories, to which Rich owes much of the inspiration for his prose, those sections are full of masculine energy and verve. They have their own way of teaching life lessons that needs no explicit verbalization.
As a fishing story that teaches about fathers and sons, the central section of Looking Through Water is mostly successful. It has the action and adventure of a boys’ novel, and enough steam to teach lessons within the action. The framing story, however, isn’t as strong. Hemingway recognized that action is sometimes its own teacher; it’s too bad that Rich didn’t trust his audience to “get it.”