The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

On Tuesday I attended a virtual birthday party for one of my oldest friends. This friend lives in Baltimore and so, while of course we all wished we could have celebrated differently, it was actually also nice that I could be part of her birthday this year, while under normal circumstances I would have only posted on Facebook or Twitter or sent a postcard (as I try to do when I remember people's birthdays far enough in advance). At this virtual birthday party it came up that she and some of her friends were in a book club, which has also gone virtual due to current events, and suddenly it was possible for me to be a part of another thing that back in our old life of a month ago I could not have joined. The book the club had already selected was The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the meeting to discuss it was just a week away. But, thanks to my work-issued iPad (which I had barely touched before the pause and which has now become my daily companion and means of connecting with the world beyond my apartment) and my recent acquisition of a New York Public Library card, for which I enrolled electronically, I was able to check out and download the book the next morning and start it the following day. I do sometimes reflect on how this whole situation has forced us to adapt very quickly to technologies that have been available for some time and also to adapt those technologies to us. (Zoom wasn't created so I could do yoga in Brooklyn in the same class with my mom in upstate New York, but yesterday morning we did just that.)

I have often wanted to be part of a book club, and here and there I have been or have come close, but I have never gotten what I hoped from one, which I think mainly comes down to having people to talk to about books I love. This tweet from Helen Rosner really spoke to me:

What’s your favorite super weird, super niche novel that you wish you had more people to talk to about?

— Helen Rosner (@hels) March 4, 2020

For me, this is nearly all of my favorite books and authors. Have any of my friends read Javier Marías or José Donoso or Mercè Rodoreda? I write about books, in large part, because I have no one to talk to about them. Even with those among my friends who are readers in somewhat the way I am, we are rarely synced in our reading. So, a book club: sign me up!

Anyway, The Water Dancer: its publication last fall escaped my notice entirely. I don't pay too much attention to new books as they come out - it's only thanks to book Twitter that they occasionally come to my notice, and so if I see something mentioned repeatedly I will begin to be aware of it as something I might want to seek out. This did not happen with The Water Dancer - I have been aware of Ta-Nehisi Coates for quite a while and I think I would have noticed if I had seen it mentioned that he published a novel. Though, I will also say, that last fall was a busy time and so maybe I wasn't online so much and maybe people were talking about it and I just missed it. In any case, all of this is to say, that I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this book. I read the first third of the book with a sense of looming dread, but then instead of things taking a turn for the worse, as I had anticipated, the book veered off in an entirely different direction and from there, I was drawn in. The most interesting thing about the book was its use of memory as a concrete and tangible thing. I won't say anything more about it now; I'm looking forward to talking about it with some friends on Tuesday.