What the World Will Look Like…

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us by Laura van den Berg
Dzanc Books, 2009, 205 pages, $16.95

Former Redivider editor Laura van den Berg’s debut collection is full of the off-in-the-distance. Her characters long for things and people unattainable, or unavailable, such as monsters, dead loved ones, self-clarity. And though it is the monsters and the dead that are getting much of the attention from reviewers, the strength of the collection lies in this yearning that is so often so close to grieving, walking the tightrope between what one might call dramatic futility and dramatic hope, the tiny distance between not knowing you can’t get what you want, and not knowing you want what you can’t get.

In the title story, a failed actress acts the part of Bigfoot at a theme park, roaring with an uninhibited longing she can only get at, she says, in character. Her boyfriend is dying, which makes it easier for her to love him. There is a perfect moment of suspension in a lake that captures their suspended life. But my favorite story is the title story, the most complex, and longest, story in the collection. Here, van den Berg has room to fill us up, ironically, with all that is left out. Celia, the narrator, wants to swim out as far as she can into the ocean and be surrounded with water, wants to separate herself-and as we see her in her desired separation and her aging mother on land, we get the sense of all the water and life in between. What is not there cannot be separated from what is.

- reviewed by Matthew Salesses