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Waterborne
A panorama of human desire and enterprise, Bruce Murkoff’s first novel is exceptional for its ambition, its grasp of history and, above all, its stunning array of characters.
Waterborne is set in the Great Depression, and culminates at the Boulder the greatest engineering project of its time, and a beacon of hope capable of altering the course of society. The nation, crippled by poverty and despair, clearly needs a transformation, and the same is true of the people. Filius Poe grew up with everything, then lost nearly all of it. Lew Beck felt deprived of everything, and now means to have his revenge. Lena McCardell, who thought she had exactly what she wanted, discovers almost overnight that only by taking her son and joining the multitude already on the road will she have the chance of a fresh start and a brighter future.
From various directions and distances, these three are inevitably drawn to this vast construction site in the Nevada desert, along with the stories of their families, their friends and their fellow travelers–the novel itself developing the force of a mighty river, then channeling and harnessing its prodigious energy. With generous understanding and absolute authority, Bruce Murkoff captures the conflicting imperatives of these vivid lives as well as the heart and breadth of the country through which they move, and whose destiny they help shape.
Waterborne is set in the Great Depression, and culminates at the Boulder the greatest engineering project of its time, and a beacon of hope capable of altering the course of society. The nation, crippled by poverty and despair, clearly needs a transformation, and the same is true of the people. Filius Poe grew up with everything, then lost nearly all of it. Lew Beck felt deprived of everything, and now means to have his revenge. Lena McCardell, who thought she had exactly what she wanted, discovers almost overnight that only by taking her son and joining the multitude already on the road will she have the chance of a fresh start and a brighter future.
From various directions and distances, these three are inevitably drawn to this vast construction site in the Nevada desert, along with the stories of their families, their friends and their fellow travelers–the novel itself developing the force of a mighty river, then channeling and harnessing its prodigious energy. With generous understanding and absolute authority, Bruce Murkoff captures the conflicting imperatives of these vivid lives as well as the heart and breadth of the country through which they move, and whose destiny they help shape.
397 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
November 27, 2013
Bruce Murkoff's debut novel, Waterborne, braves all the challenges of its monumental subject: the Hoover Dam. What a feat of literary engineering to construct a story around 6-1/2 million tons of concrete! History is strewn with the remains of novels that have collapsed under less weight; characters and themes buried beneath a rubble of details that hardworking authors couldn't keep standing. Indeed, the dimensions of this challenge make Murkoff's success all the more remarkable.
Like the great dam, the novel begins with a disparate collection of materials that makes it difficult to see how it's developing. But press on. Under Murkoff's sure hand, three unrelated stories gradually lock into place to produce a beautiful, quiet romance and a breathtaking scene of the Depression's most ambitious project.
The emotional center of the story is Filius Poe, a young engineer who's spent "the past year and a half separated from the world around him, wandering without solace on the blurred edges of his quiet life." The accidental death of his son closed down his successful career as a dam builder and extinguished his once blissful marriage. Now, called by an old colleague to the Boulder River project, he hopes that mimicking the actions of real life might gradually reanimate his dead heart.
Meanwhile, a young mother in Oklahoma has just discovered that her Bible-selling husband has been maintaining another family. In that sudden change of the light, everything about Lena's life looks different. She grabs her son and heads out to Nevada to stay with an old girlfriend who's offered her a job.
And finally, there's Lew Beck, a man as small as a child and possibly the meanest character I have ever run across. A conspiracy of anti-Semitism and parental insensitivity has mutated in Lew's mind to produce a savage human being. By 15, Lew developed a policy of ferocious retribution against anyone who mocked him. Soon after, he brutalized his father, trashed their deli, and began working through a series of construction jobs before landing a spot on the Hoover Dam project.
Unfortunately, the scenes of Lew's brutality and sexual violence may limit the book's appeal to readers who would otherwise enjoy its searching portrayal of human nature. It's the same problem, in a sense, that Milton struggled with in Paradise Lost: How to keep Satan from stealing the show. Ironically, Murkoff holds the dam and all its complicated construction in the background, but Lew's explosive scenes almost blast away the subtle story of Filius Poe.
The contrast between these two men couldn't be more striking. Filius is an emotional monolith. The tensions pulling on him are invisible along the polished skin of his life. But Murkoff catches the deep vibrations of grief running through this quiet man. We sense his pain in the arrested smile he shows to Lena's little boy, and we hear it in the letters he writes to his wife. When Filius looks at himself, he's startled by how young he still is.
Only the earth-altering work of the dam is deep enough to subsume his sorrow. He labors through two shifts most days, hoping to collapse into a dreamless sleep at his unlived-in model home. But very gently, Lena, who's also recovering from the sudden loss of family, begins to melt his affections. Sitting with her and her little boy at the kitchen table one morning, Filius has "the first good memory he's had in a year, and he wants to hold on to it like a prayer he could repeat to himself every day for the rest of his life."
As the project moves forward -- two years of building tunnels, cofferdams, and diversion streams -- the narrative loops back into the lives of Filius, Lena, and Lew, building the structure of their pasts. When these three apparently haphazard lives finally cross halfway through the novel, it's an electric moment. The wonderful possibility of happiness between Filius and Lena flashes into being just as Lew arrives to snuff it out.
Ultimately, Lew is no Satan no matter how wicked his behavior. Murkoff complicates that easy reduction by showing an instinct of real heroism: When a fellow worker is hurt suspended on a cable, Lew risks his life to help. But somehow the sparks of bravery and affection in his nature never get the oxygen they need to burn away all the anger that consumes him.
Only in the final pages of the novel, after the cofferdams are complete and the Colorado River has been successfully diverted, does the actual dam building begin. By this time, Murkoff has pooled a reservoir of suspense that threatens to burst through the covers of the book, and the finale arrives in a spectacular crescendo. What a dam; what a debut!
Like the great dam, the novel begins with a disparate collection of materials that makes it difficult to see how it's developing. But press on. Under Murkoff's sure hand, three unrelated stories gradually lock into place to produce a beautiful, quiet romance and a breathtaking scene of the Depression's most ambitious project.
The emotional center of the story is Filius Poe, a young engineer who's spent "the past year and a half separated from the world around him, wandering without solace on the blurred edges of his quiet life." The accidental death of his son closed down his successful career as a dam builder and extinguished his once blissful marriage. Now, called by an old colleague to the Boulder River project, he hopes that mimicking the actions of real life might gradually reanimate his dead heart.
Meanwhile, a young mother in Oklahoma has just discovered that her Bible-selling husband has been maintaining another family. In that sudden change of the light, everything about Lena's life looks different. She grabs her son and heads out to Nevada to stay with an old girlfriend who's offered her a job.
And finally, there's Lew Beck, a man as small as a child and possibly the meanest character I have ever run across. A conspiracy of anti-Semitism and parental insensitivity has mutated in Lew's mind to produce a savage human being. By 15, Lew developed a policy of ferocious retribution against anyone who mocked him. Soon after, he brutalized his father, trashed their deli, and began working through a series of construction jobs before landing a spot on the Hoover Dam project.
Unfortunately, the scenes of Lew's brutality and sexual violence may limit the book's appeal to readers who would otherwise enjoy its searching portrayal of human nature. It's the same problem, in a sense, that Milton struggled with in Paradise Lost: How to keep Satan from stealing the show. Ironically, Murkoff holds the dam and all its complicated construction in the background, but Lew's explosive scenes almost blast away the subtle story of Filius Poe.
The contrast between these two men couldn't be more striking. Filius is an emotional monolith. The tensions pulling on him are invisible along the polished skin of his life. But Murkoff catches the deep vibrations of grief running through this quiet man. We sense his pain in the arrested smile he shows to Lena's little boy, and we hear it in the letters he writes to his wife. When Filius looks at himself, he's startled by how young he still is.
Only the earth-altering work of the dam is deep enough to subsume his sorrow. He labors through two shifts most days, hoping to collapse into a dreamless sleep at his unlived-in model home. But very gently, Lena, who's also recovering from the sudden loss of family, begins to melt his affections. Sitting with her and her little boy at the kitchen table one morning, Filius has "the first good memory he's had in a year, and he wants to hold on to it like a prayer he could repeat to himself every day for the rest of his life."
As the project moves forward -- two years of building tunnels, cofferdams, and diversion streams -- the narrative loops back into the lives of Filius, Lena, and Lew, building the structure of their pasts. When these three apparently haphazard lives finally cross halfway through the novel, it's an electric moment. The wonderful possibility of happiness between Filius and Lena flashes into being just as Lew arrives to snuff it out.
Ultimately, Lew is no Satan no matter how wicked his behavior. Murkoff complicates that easy reduction by showing an instinct of real heroism: When a fellow worker is hurt suspended on a cable, Lew risks his life to help. But somehow the sparks of bravery and affection in his nature never get the oxygen they need to burn away all the anger that consumes him.
Only in the final pages of the novel, after the cofferdams are complete and the Colorado River has been successfully diverted, does the actual dam building begin. By this time, Murkoff has pooled a reservoir of suspense that threatens to burst through the covers of the book, and the finale arrives in a spectacular crescendo. What a dam; what a debut!
October 6, 2012
Waterborne is a terrific depression era tale that follows three lost souls whose lives intersect in Nevada at the construction site of the Hoover Dam. This is Murkoff's debut novel and it's a triumph. I was awed by the raw energy of his writing and his ability to totally transport the reader to another time and place. Waterborne has been called "one of the most under-read great novels of the past decade" I hope that will change.
April 19, 2014
I'm amazed that Murkoff has so few reviews on Amazon. I've never done reviews there but may just to recommend him. I didn't think Waterborne was as good as Red Rain but that one so well crafted that it'd be hard to beat. If you want a fast moving story, may not be for you, but if you enjoy character development, he's excellent. I wish he had another book out.
July 29, 2022
Interesting historical novel revolving around the building of Bolder Dam, now called the Hoover Dam between 1930 and 1936 during the great depression. The author weaves believable intermixing characters and an engaging plot while providing lush descriptions of the geological backdrop and the incredible engineering that went into this massive construction. I learned a lot about bridge building and was carried along for the story line. Good job Bruce, I’m going to see what else he’s written. 5*****
August 4, 2017
The writing in this was beautiful, but at the halfway point, it felt like the story was beginning to drag. Murkoff's characters were interesting and I didn't have a problem with them. But I think the book could've benefitted from a bit more editing as far as "killing your darlings" goes. Still, it was a good read.
August 15, 2017
Picked this up randomly and thoroughly enjoyed it. Could have used a dash of a humor. The detail of every scene and landscape was rich, almost excruciatingly rich.
March 15, 2017
Excellent depiction of waters -lakes and rivers, dam building, Hoover dam, Great Depression, upper Midwest & western u.s., love of engineering. Only C. McCarthy does evil better. Lew Beck is one of the meanest, but love stories of others one-ups his sordid character. Sort of abrupt ending, but imagination fills in blanks, I suppose. Great debut novel.
May 2, 2012
"The river begins." And for the next three gorgeously written pages, Bruce Murkoff describes the Colorado River's inexorable, irresistible progress over centuries, cutting its great passage through deep canyons across the land. This is writing to be parsed word by word, slowly, to be savored. It kicks off a book that's full of awe for a force of nature that demands it and full of admiration for the audacity, genius and filthy, backbreaking labor required to tame such a force. The Hoover administration has decided to build a dam near Boulder City, and the jobless throngs come racing across the country to Nevada in search of work. Among these pilgrims are Filius Poe, a "dam bum" with experience on projects in which "men worked for years to achieve something so grand they couldn't recognize its beauty until it was completed," and Lena McCardell, leaving a husband she discovered she never really knew. Both Poe and Lena are fleeing heartbreak and tragedy. Also on the road is drifter Lew Beck, a psychopath leaving behind heartbreak and tragedy of his own devising, his quick-fuse rage far out of proportion to his tiny stature (I kept thinking of Robert Blake). They'll all meet at the mammoth site of one of the country's grandest construction projects. But not for a while. Murkoff is a writer who takes his time, and his primary characters don't even reach the dam til about halfway thru the book. It's a novel that requires patience. Murkoff applies his methodical, slow-moving lyricism to everything, right down to a description of roadkill or a dog whizzing against a tree. He has a gift for evocative scene-setting that rivals James Lee Burke's. It's too bad he's not as adept with his people. The characters were too clearly defined as good and evil, black and white, and it's a boy's club of a novel. Female characters aren't particularly believable, and they're often being sexually humiliated in one way or another. The dialogue can be stiff, sounding more like something a writer would write than a person would say. And the big climax at the end feels somewhat arbitrary and rushed. But what Murkoff does right, he does well enough that I was able to forgive some of the novel's problems. Murkoff is fluent in the "poetry of endeavour" and the "choreography of big machines." "Waterborne" is a paean to man's great ambition and ingenuity and God's even more impressive Creation. It'd be a good book to take camping, assuming I wasn't too fat and lazy to go camping. Or hey, I wonder if the folks at Hoover Dam would let me set up an umbrella and a lawn chair and read it there!
April 11, 2008
This impressive debut for Murkoff combines wonderfully cadenced, vivid descriptions of the depression era West with moving characterizations that gradually emerge from the landscape into compelling life. The lives of three individuals flow towards each other — Filius Poe, a strong silent master builder whose life has crashed about his ears; Lena McCardell, a woman and her son fleeing an Okalahoma traveling salesman who turned out to have another wife, another family; and Lew Beck, a tough Jewish runt whose hatred of bullies has twisted him into a finely honed, homicidal ferocity — lives that finally meet and roil together at the construction of the great Boulder (aka Hoover) dam. Murkoff starts things off in a leisurely way, carrying you along on his assured, ambling prose suffused with sights and sounds and smells that are a strong as memory itself, and gradually builds things to the hoped for, dreaded crescendo. The book is menaced by some serious violence as Lew Beck strays further and further from the light, but in other respects this is a big, meaty, rangy old fashioned novel in the tradition of Steinbeck and McMurtry.
October 25, 2011
Follows a bunch of different people in the 1930's whose lives intersect with the building of a large dam in Las Vegas. It was pretty well written but there was a lot of violence/dark sexual stuff that went along with the character development. I could see that he was trying to paint pictures of the characters but it felt like we were just wallowing in the characters weird life and I didn't want to hear about the gross stuff he did to people in order to know that he was messed up. There were some really bright spots but the icky stuff overshadowed which really seemed unnecessary. I made it all the way through but wouldn't recommend this book.
September 27, 2013
Mostly talented author with distinct weakness in transitions from one character's perspective to another. (I hate having to re-read sections because I was thinking I was reading about one character only to later discover it's another character.)
He also tends to fill pages with information that does little for the character's identity or plot advancement.
He also tends to fill pages with information that does little for the character's identity or plot advancement.
July 29, 2012
Fabulous writing and character development and some very interesting discriptions of the period (mid-depression) and construction of Boulder (now Hoover) Dam. The ending was a bit far fetched but not enough to take away from 5 stars. A book the discerning reader should enjoy.
Read
November 21, 2012Waterborne by Bruce Murkoff has been compared to both Water for Elephants and Snow Falling on Cedars in both writing style and time frame. This is an engrossing and well-written piece of historical fiction, with characters that you will find yourself rooting for
June 17, 2011
Just didn't grab me, even though I love working class fiction, and the era. Very unlikable protagonist. Which is sometimes okay, but didn't work for me here. Probably just a personal thing.
July 30, 2008
I truly enjoyed the book. It took you place and time before the hoover dam existed. I really liked the characters.
June 4, 2010
An enjoyable book, with very well developed characters, in which the author draws you into their lives, hopes, problems, and dreams. Ending is very good.
Read
April 2, 2011couldn't get into this. I didn't care for the author's prose style (sort of Steinbeck like without being interesting)
June 16, 2012
This book was ok. Lots of characters to keep track of (in the present and as they recall past events)until they come together over 1/2 way through the book. I didn't like the ending.
October 27, 2013
Didn't catch me at the beginning.
July 12, 2016
Boulder Dam story. Good and evil characters merge at the construction site of the dam. Not as good as In Sunlight in a Beautiful Garden.
July 6, 2010
Mostly read - overwritten and WAY too much backstory!
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews