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- Book Sense choice
- A Literary Guild Featured Alternate Selection
- Chicago Tribune Best Books of 2003
- New York Times Book Review Notable Book
“Sweetwater is a repository for all of Roxana Robinson’s writerly gifts, most notably her keen eye for the details that make up the veneer of social and familial life and her awareness of the darker psychic rivers that run below that surface. She is a master at moving from the art of description to the work of excavating the truths about ourselves.”
—Billy Collins
“There is such quiet power in this fateful novel, present from the start and gathering to its culmination: a story of loss and remarriage, and of the harm done to, and by, vulnerable men and women. This is cool, intrepid writing, not a word wasted, creating a human tension that reflects our endangered world.”
—Shirley Hazzard
From: Booklist
Critically acclaimed but not well known, Robinson will reach a broader audience with this hold-your-breath novel of loss and love. Devoted to her work for Environmental Protection Resources, Isabel is trying hard to recover from the shock of her first husband's death. She likes Paul's thoughtfulness and convinces herself that a peaceful rather than passionate second marriage is appropriate. Loving wilderness, she embarks optimistically on a vacation in the Adirondacks with Paul's parents and brother, Whitney. But rather than contentedly contemplating nature, Isabel finds herself embroiled in tricky family conflicts. Alarmed by Paul's simmering fury and dangerously attracted to Whitney, she is assailed by painful memories of her harrowing first marriage, which Robinson skillfully sets in chilling counterpoint to the increasingly heated dynamics of Isabel's present predicament. As family strife turns incendiary, forest fires erupt on the drought-afflicted landscape, and Isabel fights for her life in an emotional and literal inferno. Writing with rapturous intensity of nature both wild and human, Robinson forges a love story of unusual complexity and satisfaction.
Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From: The Los Angeles Times
Reading "Sweetwater," a novel by Roxana Robinson ("This Is My Daughter"), is a lot like watching an Olympic diver. We are vaguely aware of the structure and form that holds the diver's efforts together, and yet entranced with the beauty presented. We watch, our breath held, anticipating little errors because we've seen just how difficult such feats are to execute flawlessly. Nail it, we silently urge....
Abundant in poetic language and incisive imagery, Robinson unfolds what seems, at first, to be a subdued story about relationships and love, but which slowly reveals ever-dilating depth and breadth. The book plumbs the subject of human communion and how necessary this connection is to sustain life. Like the precious water Isabel shepherds, the human spirit is a marvel to behold, and fragile. Robinson frames this vista with an expertly constructed narrative. And when she pulls off the ending with breathtaking skill, the effect is utterly satisfying.
By Bernadette Murphy, Special to The Times
From: Newsday
Of WASP heritage, but not of the upper-crust, East Coast variety, I came to the works of their literary chroniclers like a spy. The exclusive clubs and watering holes portrayed by John Cheever and Louis Auchincloss were nearly as distant from my middle-class, Midwestern experience as they must have been for the offspring of Italian or Jewish immigrants. All of us were uninvited outsiders peering through the windows, sometimes in awe, sometimes in dismay.
In the novels and stories of Roxana Robinson, the accoutrements of Upper East Side WASP life are kept discreetly in the background. Nannies, private-school educations and the good life expected to follow are taken for granted. What Robinson never lets us forget, though, is that privilege is no protection against pain. Disappointment, heartache and death await us all.
"Summer Light," Robinson's 1988 debut novel, depicts a woman weighing her perplexing choice between an unfaithful husband and a sometime lover. "This Is My Daughter," her next, dramatizes the pitfalls of second marriage. The ambiguities of love and marriage also echo throughout Robinson's story collections, "A Glimpse of Scarlet" and "Asking for Love."
Though Isabel Green, the heroine of Robinson's new novel, "Sweetwater," can't claim membership in the WASP elite, she was brought up among them in Westchester County's tony Bedford Hills, where her father served as an Episcopalian priest. Now, several years after the death of her first husband, Michael, she marries into WASP old money.
Both Isabel and her new husband, Paul Simmons, are public-spirited Upper East Siders. Paul has enough money that there's no need to worry about making more. While he works for a foundation that supports medical research, Isabel can continue writing on water pollution for an activist environmental law firm.
Still not over her grief, Isabel, at 47, has come to her second marriage with lowered expectations. Love isn't essential to the equation. "All the other things - wildness and bliss ... the urgency of sex - lay behind her. ... What she aimed for now was loyalty and affection. ... [S]he didn't want to be old alone."
Seven months after the wedding, Isabel arrives with Paul at the Adirondacks lodge that has been summer home for the Simmons clan since the 1890s. Casually rustic yet grand in family memories, Sweetwater quietly proclaims a heritage of entitlement. Here she will have the opportunity to better know her parents-in-law, Douglas and Charlotte, and to meet Paul's brother, Whit. But once this rugged outdoorsman enters the picture, it's clear to Isabel (and to the reader) that she's married the wrong brother.
What nonetheless provides urgency to the story are two parallel dramas, Isabel's past with Michael and her present dilemma. Here Robinson's superior literary skills come into play. She employs neither fancy prose nor postmodernist sleight- of-hand. Instead, she sets up subtle calibrations of mood and character, almost exclusively through telling dialogue. Thus Robinson exposes Paul's adolescent querulousness and his mother's penchant for unreflective harsh judgments.
In the past, we see the young Isabel drawn like a moth to Michael's flame of intelligence and energy. This despite her increasing awareness of the debilitating paralysis of his depressions. In her naïveté, she hopes to save him. As Michael's journalism career blazes from the Baltimore Sun to a Time-like magazine in New York to its London bureau and back, the darkness periodically closes him down, shuts out Isabel and pushes her closer to quitting the marriage. Only the presence of a son, Ben, and her desire for another child puts off the inevitable.
By contrast, Paul's kindness, good humor and steadiness seemed a welcome respite from Michael's rages and emotional lockdowns. At Sweetwater, however, Isabel begins to see a far less appealing Paul - defensive, volatile, perpetually and sophomorically at war with his brother. "You're 45 and still scrambling around in the dirt," Paul sneers at him.
Never mind that Whit, who studies mountain lion behavior in Wyoming, is a respected conservation biologist. Paul is too shortsighted to see that both he and his brother have been wounded by parental expectations that they take up professions that bore them, banking or business.
The book's notable flaw is that Isabel's son, Ben, figures so little in the story we wonder why the author bothered to include him. Because it's not Ben's boyish animal warmth that comforts during Michael's spells but the distraction of work, we're astonished to find Isabel desperately wanting another baby in her early 40s, even to the extent of undergoing in vitro fertilization. She may have hoped for a daughter, and the eventual consolation of female companionship, but we're just relieved for her that the effort failed.
Throughout, water provides an apt metaphor for nourishment and the possibility of second (or third) chances. "[I]n a natural system," Isabel observes, "water purified itself. Water was always in the process of returning to its limpid, pristine, original self, a tendency [she] found mysterious and oddly touching, an unexpected note of grace."
"Sweetwater" abounds with grace notes, for sure, but never at the expense of hard-won, painful truths. This is domestic fiction with bite.
Dan Cryer, Staff Writer
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
From: Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“In four previous works of fiction, Robinson established herself as an astute and sensitive chronicler of domestic tensions, particularly among affluent families in wealthy enclaves of Manhattan and exclusive summer abodes. Here she broadens her canvas to introduce larger social issues....Sweetwater succeeds as a moving study of a woman’s emergence from a suffocating life.”
