The Covenant of Water
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I don’t think Abraham Verghese is for me. I’m not intimidated by large books; I’ll gladly crush a big book and then brag about it for the next year, so that’s not the issue. Verghese is clearly capable of writing intricate narratives. Cutting for Stone is 658 pages and Covenant of Water is 715, and both stories jump from different perspectives that all end up interweaving. But sometimes less is more and I feel like in both cases, the stories are seriously overwritten. It’s an editor emergency!
I had a bone to pick with Cutting for Stone and I do feel like Verghese redeemed himself in Covenant of Water. The latter still involved medicine but to a much lesser extent– I wasn’t waterboarded with surgical minutiae. Verghese must have read my review because this time around, he substituted all of that medical jargon with actual useful insight into the culture at hand—rural south India in the 20th century. I learned about their marital customs and superstitions, witnessed how entrenched the caste system remained over time, and saw how difficult it was for these isolated communities to adapt to globalization and an expanding government. The setting intrigued me. I liked the pace of the character’s lives– the patient endurance of hardships. Because they had more limited opportunities and there was more at stake, there was more weight to their actions. For example, a girl was given hoop earrings, which was a sign that she was now expected to be a wise woman and should act as such. Gestures meant more back then.
Still, I’m not sold on Verghese’s writing. It’s a little try-hard! In this book, water was an overwrought metaphor. He wanted to emphasize the idea that all water is connected and only land and people are discontinuous, but it became so forced. I also feel like the ending was forced. There had been so much entwined plot and in the end, he wanted to connect some characters regardless of whether it read as too convenient and unnecessary. Stop trying to make fetch happen.
Lastly, I typically like books that jump around in narration, but I don’t in this case. Verghese can write distinct characters with unique voices, but good lord some of them are soooo boring. That’s fine if it’s not a long chapter, but the man writes for forever. So, if you don’t like a character’s arc, you have to roll your eyes and say oh great I’ve got this loser for the next hundred pages. The only person I can think of that does this well for long stretches of time is David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest and Barbara Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible. Stick with those instead. The Covenant of Water receives 2 out of 5 flames.
