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Northwater
From the glittering frantic world of the international jet set, Althea North, now Countess Branzini, has come back to Northwater, the New England family mansion she had abandoned so many years before. Her beauty still undimmed, still possessed of the wild charm that beguiled so many innocents, Althea is haunted by her wasted years of debauchery - of drugs, scandalous affairs, and a meaningless marriage.
Now she wants desperately to salvage what she can of her life - and to find the key to the ugly mystery of her mother's sudden and violent death, a mystery that has followed her and her sister Kitty into tormented womanhood.
Somewhere at Northwater lies that key - a key which she alone can find...must find...or surrender them both to a future bound by tragedy and terror.
Now she wants desperately to salvage what she can of her life - and to find the key to the ugly mystery of her mother's sudden and violent death, a mystery that has followed her and her sister Kitty into tormented womanhood.
Somewhere at Northwater lies that key - a key which she alone can find...must find...or surrender them both to a future bound by tragedy and terror.
215 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 1968
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 28, 2024
Althea North has returned to Northwater, her New England home. although still young, she has precious little time left on this earth. her purpose: reunite with her estranged but still loving sister; explain the mystery of her mother's terrible life and violent death; have a last taste of love; find forgiveness for herself; and, most importantly, try to understand the plans of God, so that she may finally have the strength to meet Him, all too soon.
a brief, deeply compassionate, emotionally affecting novel. the prose is elegant and transparent. the story is haunting, elegiac; the pace is relaxed. Northwater is a kind of sweet, dark dirge, a funereal song but one sung before the death has come to pass. it is also an ode to the fragility and strength of family, to remembering, and to the need to embrace living, even unto death. this book has both dread and lightness, and an understanding of the sometimes unbearable heaviness of being. a wise book, melancholy and tender. a mystery of sorts, like much of life.
it appears as if this was marketed as either a sort of "suspense novel for women" - along the lines of wonderful authors like Mary Stewart - or as a straightforward gothic (although of course those are overlapping genres). I think that both women's suspense novels and gothics are sorely underrated, much like romance novels, because chauvinism. just want to make that clear - I'm not against them. but this is not a genre novel, despite its mystery and its murder. it is a literary novel, and all that that label implies. it belongs alongside other forgotten but brilliant studies of regret, despair, and the possibility or impossibility of redemption and transcendence; books as diverse and as underread as Mortal Leap, The Story of Harold, Thanatos, Island People, The Pyx, The Passionate North, Montana Gothic, and The Corrida at San Feliu. books sorely needing rediscovery!
I read this during a time that has me frequently contemplating my own mortality, the mortality of a dear friend, mortality in general. choices made or not, family and community and loneliness and togetherness, how to live a life, the fate that awaits us, and what does it all mean after all, what did we do with our years spent on this earth. some novels are read at just the perfect time, and so it was for me with this perfect little novel. many tears were shed.
a brief, deeply compassionate, emotionally affecting novel. the prose is elegant and transparent. the story is haunting, elegiac; the pace is relaxed. Northwater is a kind of sweet, dark dirge, a funereal song but one sung before the death has come to pass. it is also an ode to the fragility and strength of family, to remembering, and to the need to embrace living, even unto death. this book has both dread and lightness, and an understanding of the sometimes unbearable heaviness of being. a wise book, melancholy and tender. a mystery of sorts, like much of life.
it appears as if this was marketed as either a sort of "suspense novel for women" - along the lines of wonderful authors like Mary Stewart - or as a straightforward gothic (although of course those are overlapping genres). I think that both women's suspense novels and gothics are sorely underrated, much like romance novels, because chauvinism. just want to make that clear - I'm not against them. but this is not a genre novel, despite its mystery and its murder. it is a literary novel, and all that that label implies. it belongs alongside other forgotten but brilliant studies of regret, despair, and the possibility or impossibility of redemption and transcendence; books as diverse and as underread as Mortal Leap, The Story of Harold, Thanatos, Island People, The Pyx, The Passionate North, Montana Gothic, and The Corrida at San Feliu. books sorely needing rediscovery!
I read this during a time that has me frequently contemplating my own mortality, the mortality of a dear friend, mortality in general. choices made or not, family and community and loneliness and togetherness, how to live a life, the fate that awaits us, and what does it all mean after all, what did we do with our years spent on this earth. some novels are read at just the perfect time, and so it was for me with this perfect little novel. many tears were shed.
April 3, 2023
This is not a genre novel, as the cover and blurbs suggest. It is literary fiction and it is extremely accomplished.
March 24, 2016
For the past couple days I've been considering how to review this book. It's nothing like other pulp gothics I've read. In fact, it's more of a literary fiction novella than anything else.
NORTHWATER is a short book. It's thin & cheap & weightless -- but that's only the formatting. The content itself is neither cheap nor weightless. I won't even attempt to summarize the plot; read the blurb for a basic idea, because it's accurate, though deceptively simple. More than anything else, NORTHWATER is a meditation on life vs death & faith vs forgiveness.
...Sorry if that sounds heavy-handed. :P
The narrator, Althea, is carrying some heavy baggage -- the exact nature of which is blurred between reality & fantasy -- and her thoughts wander between the present & the past, gradually revealing the skeletons of a particularly off-kilter family. That family consists of a now-deceased mother & father (but how did the mother really die?) & Althea's younger sister Kitty, the "sensitive one" (as opposed to Althea's being labeled as the "sensual one"). Like Althea & Kitty, the reader wonders if their mother haunts the Northwater mansion...but who brings the ghost out of hiding? Is she a ghost in the typical sense, or a memory that plagues both sisters in different ways?
It's one of those eternal Turn of the Screw questions, but Althea's narration is nothing like Henry James. Her casual-yet-linguistic (and sometimes slyly humored) storytelling reminds me of Mary Stewart, yet there's a distinct Shirley Jackson flavor about NORTHWATER. Even the most mundane activities have a slightly warped feel -- enticing the reader to expect something sinister to leap out from behind the nearest bush, but not (usually) delivering on that promise. In the same way that Hitchcock would film ordinary activities on the diagonal, NORTHWATER pans across memory & fact in such a way that the ultimate resolution isn't satisfactory. The story is closed, yes...but does that closure come at the expense of the truth? Perhaps.
The resolution is where faith & forgiveness come into play. Without turning itself inside out & bending the reader's ear into obnoxious preachery, this novel questions the nature of religious faith. When does forgiveness become more important than the literal truth of one's history? Where does self-sacrifice begin bleeding into an appreciation of Higher Being? In NORTHWATER, the reader decides for themselves whether the novel's closure is spawned by true events -- but Althea's ultimate concession is her truth, whether accurate or not.
Anyway...this is an interesting gothic novel. It moves at a leisurely pace within its 144 pages, pausing to examine Althea's memories or offer oblique theoretical questions to the reader, but it's not a boring book. If more so-called contemporary literary fiction had this kind of readable depth, it wouldn't be such a maligned genre for those of us who don't live our entire lives closeted by academia. *wiggles eyebrow*
NORTHWATER is a short book. It's thin & cheap & weightless -- but that's only the formatting. The content itself is neither cheap nor weightless. I won't even attempt to summarize the plot; read the blurb for a basic idea, because it's accurate, though deceptively simple. More than anything else, NORTHWATER is a meditation on life vs death & faith vs forgiveness.
...Sorry if that sounds heavy-handed. :P
The narrator, Althea, is carrying some heavy baggage -- the exact nature of which is blurred between reality & fantasy -- and her thoughts wander between the present & the past, gradually revealing the skeletons of a particularly off-kilter family. That family consists of a now-deceased mother & father (but how did the mother really die?) & Althea's younger sister Kitty, the "sensitive one" (as opposed to Althea's being labeled as the "sensual one"). Like Althea & Kitty, the reader wonders if their mother haunts the Northwater mansion...but who brings the ghost out of hiding? Is she a ghost in the typical sense, or a memory that plagues both sisters in different ways?
It's one of those eternal Turn of the Screw questions, but Althea's narration is nothing like Henry James. Her casual-yet-linguistic (and sometimes slyly humored) storytelling reminds me of Mary Stewart, yet there's a distinct Shirley Jackson flavor about NORTHWATER. Even the most mundane activities have a slightly warped feel -- enticing the reader to expect something sinister to leap out from behind the nearest bush, but not (usually) delivering on that promise. In the same way that Hitchcock would film ordinary activities on the diagonal, NORTHWATER pans across memory & fact in such a way that the ultimate resolution isn't satisfactory. The story is closed, yes...but does that closure come at the expense of the truth? Perhaps.
The resolution is where faith & forgiveness come into play. Without turning itself inside out & bending the reader's ear into obnoxious preachery, this novel questions the nature of religious faith. When does forgiveness become more important than the literal truth of one's history? Where does self-sacrifice begin bleeding into an appreciation of Higher Being? In NORTHWATER, the reader decides for themselves whether the novel's closure is spawned by true events -- but Althea's ultimate concession is her truth, whether accurate or not.
Anyway...this is an interesting gothic novel. It moves at a leisurely pace within its 144 pages, pausing to examine Althea's memories or offer oblique theoretical questions to the reader, but it's not a boring book. If more so-called contemporary literary fiction had this kind of readable depth, it wouldn't be such a maligned genre for those of us who don't live our entire lives closeted by academia. *wiggles eyebrow*
May 2, 2017
"Northwater" is billed as a gothic, but it's really more than that. 11 years after her mother's death and the failure of her marriage, Althea North comes back home to her family's New England mansion to lick her wounds. Althea is not a typical heroine: she has a past and has left a fair amount of damage in her wake. The novel follows her attempts to come to terms with her past, present, and future, surrounded by memories that increasingly suggest that redemption will be harder than expected. Exceptionally well-written, with an atmospheric setting, sympathetically drawn characters and a generosity of spirit, this is a powerful, emotionally intense novel that pushed the bounds of what a genre novel can be.
September 14, 2024
This is a good little book I'd recommend to anyone. Gothic, but not too gothic, short and atmospheric, some glimmers of Rebecca.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews