Swept up in currents of love and betrayal
The Season of Open Water
By Dawn Clifton Tripp
Random House, 289 pp., $24.95
Dawn Clifton Tripp's second novel, ''The Season of Open Water," is likely to be promoted as an impassioned love story. In fact, the novel's dominant image suggests a different emphasis. Seventeen-year-old Noel, a ship's carpenter with a ''gift for seeing," is working on a whaler unlucky in the hunt. The frustrated and restless crew searches fruitlessly for a ''slick or a spout, a fin or a blow," tacking west in the Arctic morning and east in the afternoon. Suddenly, Noel spies a pod of 400 walrus cows and pups. The lyrical description of the blooming Arctic nature is cut short when the crew slaughters the pod in a moment of senseless, shocking violence.
Sixty years later, in 1927, Noel is still haunted by his role in the slaughter. Now a grandfather, he lives simply in South Westport, Mass., with his widowed daughter, Cora; his 18-year-old granddaughter, Bridge; and her older brother, Luce. In good times, Noel works as a carpenter; in bad times, he lives off the river and the land. He digs clams, tends his garden, and mines the pelts of dead foxes.
In the world of 1927, Noel finds it a struggle to maintain his simple values. He scavenges bootleg liquor flung overboard by fleeing rumrunners, though he resists working directly for the rum-running syndicate. He worries about Luce, now working the ice route once held by his dead father. He is also concerned about Bridge, who seems ''a little fierce and free" even while she shares her grandfather's love of wood and garden.
Clearly South Westport's natural paradise is veering from innocence. Given the chance to make a year's income for one job, Noel agrees to build a boat for the rumrunners, believing that ''no one will judge him for it." This lawlessness is magnified in his grandchildren. They are shoplifters, housebreakers, and even, briefly, car thieves. Brother and sister frolic like Adam and Eve, literally rolling in the grass under their mother's drying sheets. Although they are now adults, they continue to share a morning bed. Noel feels uncomfortable about their physical closeness; and Luce admits to ''an odd sense of guilt, fear, and at the same time, a strange, complicated desire" for his blossoming sister.
This pre-crash, Prohibition-driven world is moving toward violent change. Noel's neighbors, some double-crossers and other lawbreakers, are being executed by the syndicate and the border patrol. Mill workers are on strike in nearby New Bedford. The summer residents are threatening Westport's natural serenity; worse, they are buying refrigerators. Luce is restless, the ''dark little part of him" tempted by the easy money of the rumrunners; and Bridge finds herself drawn magnetically to Henry Vonnicker, summer resident turned year-rounder. Almost in sight over the horizon, the stock market crash and the Depression wait to jolt the family.
We are reminded that the American Dream is as double branched as the Westport River, where much of the action is located. The summer people show off their autos, alcohol, and parties, while Luce dreams of starting over in California or Kauai. He can only get a ''stake" by working in the dangerous liquor trade, its syndicate a complex perversion of American enterprise with middlemen, runners, and smugglers. The local boss is a fancy-dressed ''double-bladed knife." This illegal world practices ''reliable violence" with ''clear-cut and justified" retribution. This unambiguous value system may be representative of outlaw American justice, but it is also harsh and unforgiving.
Set against such social and economic pressures, the love story seems much less compelling or believable. Henry, the third leg of the Bridge-Luce triangle, is emotionally scarred from World War I. A surgeon, he returned from war a hero, but he is on a downward slide. Numbed by the terrible wounds he treated, he has developed a nervous trembling that ends his surgical career, his Boston life, and, effectively, his marriage. Now 32, he manages one of the few New Bedford mills that are not on strike and virtually hides in the ''dark and stifling heat" of the machines. To him, any natural beauty is a ''dream, a trick, a sleight of hand."
Still, the novel asks us to believe that love is magic. Cora's wedding to her husband was marked by a meteor shower, and Noel remains devoted to the intense memory of his dead wife who sometimes seems to come back to him in the night. Similarly, Bridge brings Henry back to life, even though it takes the couple two years to make contact. Modern readers might be uncertain about what is stopping them, inhibition or forbearance. Certainly, it is hard to believe that the lawless Bridge and the desperate Henry, so mutually drawn, would exhibit such staying power.
The rum-running plot has much more life. When Luce is at the helm of his boat, the story can be gripping, at least to readers who prefer blasts of sudden violence to the lulling rhythm of Bridge's thoughts. These, the narrator says, are ''liquid, moving dark wind, blue flax, sweet crushed fern, the smells of deep fall, the last smells, bayberry, wild grape, salt rose, pine."
It is no surprise that the story's end coincides with the crash of the stock market. The slaughtered walruses have set us up for such violence, economic or otherwise. But the details of this violence will be a surprise, especially to those readers who have been captured by Tripp's vision of a world tacking between innocence and death.
Judy Budz is a professor of English at Fitchburg State College. 
